Categories & taxonomies

A classification that fits your speciality

A numismatic house, a stamp dealer and a fine art auctioneer do not classify objects the same way. Selloff does not impose a fixed list: you define taxonomies, such as main category, country, period or material, and build a tree of categories and subcategories inside each one. One taxonomy is marked as the default and serves as the lot's main category.

Rules per taxonomy

For each taxonomy you decide:

• whether a lot can have one value or several, and whether the order chosen on the lot is kept
• whether at least one value is required when describing a lot
• whether it only appears when the main category has a particular value, which gives each type of object its own description mask
• whether it is available as a filter on your website through the API

Categories can have a dedicated page in the API listing all their lots, and their names, descriptions and API display names can be translated.

Automatic category descriptions

Writing a description for hundreds of categories is rarely a priority. The description automation builds them from rules: conditions on the category's fields and a text per language using tokens such as the category name, its full path, its parent or its taxonomy. Individual categories can be excluded. The texts give category pages online useful content for visitors and search engines.

One taxonomy, several uses

The same categories serve as collecting areas on contact records, where Selloff totals the amounts bid and spent in each area, and on opportunities. They drive catalogue sorting, with an order that can be overridden per catalogue, as well as lot searches and exports, and the lot import can match categories by name and create missing ones. See lot descriptions and segmentation.