Following the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation to wear face masks in public to combat COVID-19, Etsy, the online marketplace, witnessed a massive demand for face masks. This surge required Etsy to move with greater urgency to create a taxonomy category for face masks, as it had none for the masks its buyers wanted.
Etsy’s established workflow consumed two weeks for releasing a new taxonomy version. The shift in inventory and dramatic increase in traffic posed many exciting challenges to their engineering team. The team needed to scale up infrastructure, build new buyer experiences, and support sellers in listing their new items. In the case of creating a category for face masks, there was the added challenge of recategorizing a vast number of miscategorized face masks and coverings.
To begin with, taxonomists generated dozens of rules to help accomplish the change. They relied on keywords, stop words, existing categories, and other indicators to identify new face masks and coverings category listings. As there was no time for Etsy’s engineers to optimize the process, they employed whatever manual workarounds they could find to keep things moving. Once the new category was live and the migrations completed, the engineers turned to optimization and process improvements.
Etsy’s experience with face masks made their team responsive and agile in terms of process and engineering capabilities. Consequently, the process of launching a new taxonomy category has been reduced from two weeks to hours. This was accomplished by re-architecting how taxonomy data integrates with other systems at Etsy and automating those integration points. The new architecture decouples the taxonomy from non-business-critical functions, resulting in a leaner system.
In the course of creating a taxonomy category for face masks, Etsy’s engineering team gained the confidence and built the tools to migrate listings into new, appropriate categories as needed. These automation improvements make large-scale changes less cumbersome, time-consuming, and risky. It ultimately allows Etsy to meet its sellers' needs and continue to provide buyers with the best possible shopping experience.
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