Enhanced product categorization for Smart Business Buying
Procurement administrators juggle a variety of responsibilities, between managing spend, approving orders, and enforcing procurement policies, while buyers look to better understand how to purchase within the boundaries set by their organization. Accurate product classifications play a critical role in these processes, enabling administrators to drive compliance and buyers to ensure their purchases meet those compliance standards.
Amazon Business classified our ASINs using the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code and ECLASS taxonomy product classifications as these are industry standard and are commonly used within procurement. Customers can utilize these codes for buying policies that control purchasing, to enable the buying process for Punchout, and for spend analysis across product categories.
Since launching these codes in 2019, Amazon Business customers have leveraged UNSPSC and ECLASS to bring much needed accuracy and granularity to their procurement processes. We have continued to invest in this technology to bring even more accuracy to our catalog classification. With this, customers can reinforce business compliant purchasing through policies and by limiting unintended products in selection for buyers.
In 2024, we deployed a new multi-class, hierarchical machine learning model that can access vast amounts of product information to support efforts around scaling classification and improving accuracy across the catalog. With the threshold for classification decision at >95%, this model proactively reduces the probability of incorrect classification. In 2025, we will initiate continuous monitoring that will quickly identify and resolve any product categorization errors. Thus far, we’ve reached 91.6% product classification accuracy at the family code level, which is the 3rd most granular tier out of 4.
“We know administrators rely on UNSPSC and ECLASS codes to set controls for their buyers. We continue to invest in our catalog taxonomy to improve and expand our taxonomy and provide greater accuracy for our customers.”
— Julie Scully, Director of Software Development for Amazon Business
This new approach, with a 95% confidence in decisions, not only improves quality but also improves the granularity in product categorization. Adminstrators get the flexibility to adjust the control grains at varying granularity which helps them to regulate the selection available to buyers for purchase and maintain compliance.
Are you interested in leveraging UNSPSC and ECLASS for your procurement processes? Learn more about how to create buying policies with Guided Buying.
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