Gostockup project · Feb 2025 – Sep 2026 · live
A catalog where shoppers find what they need
How a catalog of nearly 8,000 items with duplicates and inconsistent names became a clear category tree, tools for the team and an assortment a third the size.
The catalog is the first thing a shopper sees. It’s also what the warehouse, stock and discounts rely on.
In early 2025, Gostockup’s catalog had duplicates, inconsistent names and nearly 8,000 items. Categories followed internal habits: convenient for staff, while shoppers had to hunt.
I worked through it in stages, each one building on the last.
Stages
Five steps to order
Cleaning up duplicates was one of my first tasks when I joined. The whole operations rebuild started there.
Five stages
- Duplicates Feb 2025: one product, one listing
- Standards 2025: shared rules for names, weight and attributes
- Tree 2026: 4 category levels from shopper feedback
- Tools 2026: category builder and tag cleanup
- Assortment May – Sep 2026: from 7,928 to ~2,527
Structure and tools
Rules that don’t live in one person’s head
I tried to turn every rule into a tool the whole team can use.
Built around how people shop
I put together a 4-level category tree from the feedback of ~300 customers and wrote the rules for Smart Collections in Shopify, so products land in the right sections by rule.
No more waiting on one person
From my spec, a developer built a web tool where staff assign new products to categories themselves. Category decisions moved from one person to a shared reference.
One button instead of four hours
Discounts run on tags: the tag discount:15 gives an item 15% off. Removing a tag from ~5,000 products meant an export, manual prep and a re-upload. Now it’s a button that works through the API.
Active items in the catalog
Time to clear one tag from ~5,000 products
Assortment: catalog data. Tag time: my own measurement.
Assortment
A third of the items
Lots of slow-moving items made the warehouse harder to run, tied up cash and weighed down the catalog. I analyzed demand over a year of sales and flagged the items in the “red zone”.
We decided what to cut together with purchasing and the warehouse. There are fewer items on the site, but the warehouse is simpler, less cash sits in stock and profit held.
Tag cleanup
The first version hit the limits
The button was built from my spec, but it kept hitting limits and ran slowly. I pushed for the developer to find a way to speed it up, and one operation now takes 10 minutes.
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn
My full career and notes on the work are there too