Automatic classification of products in P2P marketplaces

Abstract

Product classification is a critical task for the smooth running of the purchase process in e-commerce websites. When it comes to P2P marketplaces, users can act both as sellers and as buyers, and they need to assign predefined categories to the products they want to sell. Besides being tedious for users, this task can result in ambiguous or inaccurate assignments. This article presents a method for the automatic categorization of items offered in a local P2P marketplace using a multi-level classification approach. Our experiments demonstrated a significant improvement in the classification results of the proposed solution compared to a traditional direct classification approach.