Category Matching

Category Matching

Category Matching in the eBay setup can be a bit intimidating but it's not so bad when you take it piece by piece.
If you look at the Category Matchings section in the eBay config you'll see three columns: Cat #, Field, and Match. Let's take these one-by-one.

Cat #
Here you should see the categories you set up in eBay. If you do, move on to the next column. If you don't then you need to either go to eBay and set up your categories or get a token.

Field
Here you'll see a drop-down menu with the options: category, media, p0, p1, p2, p3, p4, source, notes, title, author. These are the fields that the uploader will look for you match terms in.

• category: This will pull from both your ABE Catalog & AoB Category fields.
• media: This will pull from your Media field (Hardcover, Paperback, DVD, etc)
• p0, p1, p2, p3, p4: These will pull from your private fields. You can put whatever you want in here.
• source: This will pull from your source field. This is an internal AOB field to mark where you got your books from.
• notes: This will pull from your notes field. (Your description of the condition of the books)
• title: This will pull from your title field.
• author: This will pull from your author field.

Match
This is where you enter in the terms to match on for each category. These terms are what is in each listing that denotes what category it's supposed to go into.

A little more background
So .. now you've got the different columns down .. but what do you do with them? Well here's how the actual matching works. When the uploader takes an item it runs it through your eBay script (what you're building in the config page) and it compares it to your category matching. For the first category, it looks in the field you selected and sees if the match term you entered is in there. If so it marks that category .. if not, it moves on to the next category and so on.

For each item in your inventory, you have to have a match-term in your listing somewhere. Specifically .. you need to have it somewhere in the fields listed above. If you have something already in your inventory that can be used to match the categories then you're good to go .. otherwise you have to go item by item and add something in (yeah .. it sucks .. I know) If you have to go through and add them in manually then generally your best options are the Category, ABE Catalog, or the private fields, but use whatever works best for you.

Setting up the Matching

So now you've got match terms in all of your listings .. you just gotta set it up. Look at the first category .. under 'field' select the field where the match term for this category is .. under 'match' enter in the match term(s) that signify this category. You can enter in multiple ones by separating them with a comma, but no spaces between different terms as such: match term, other match term,another match term,etc.  Work your way down the page doing the same for each category. That's all there is to it :)

Example:

You didn't think I'd leave you without an example, did you? Let's say you have the category 'Science Fiction' denoted by the term in the browse path Books:Fiction:Science Fiction .. it would look something like this:

Cat #	Field	Match
Science Fiction-11235821	Category	Books:Fiction:Science Fiction
Religion & Philosophy-24681012	Category	Books:Nonfiction:Religion & Philosophy

Want all of them to just go to your book category and not into different ones?
Enter hardback,hardcover,paperback,Spiral-bound,Mass Market,Binding,Board book,Cloth into your match field and set the Field drop-down box to Media next your book category.