IDEA Foundation
Industries/E-commerce
Catalogue & merchandising AI

AI that moves 200,000 SKUs an hour.

We engineer AI into retail and e-commerce workflows. Category mapping at 95%+ accuracy (mcgrocer case study). RAG-powered product search. Agentic merchandising. Real-time recommendation systems.

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200K SKUs·95%+ accuracy·8-level taxonomy·UK · EU · US·ISO 27001
Sector challenges

The catalogue scales — the manual work was never going to.

Catalogue scale

Hundreds of thousands of SKUs across thousands of vendor partners. Manual mapping is months of work, and the catalogue keeps growing while you do it.

Taxonomy drift

Vendor categories don't match your taxonomy, your taxonomy doesn't match the buyer's mental model, and every refresh introduces fresh inconsistency.

Confidence thresholds

An automated classifier that's right 70% of the time is useless. The bar is high-90s with calibrated confidence — and a clear escalation path for the long tail.

Multilingual product data

Titles, descriptions, and attributes arrive in multiple languages and inconsistent character sets. Search has to work across them; merchandising has to respect them.

Real-time relevance

Stock, price, and promotions shift hourly. Recommendations and search rankings have to keep up — stale relevance signals are worse than no relevance signals.

What we build

Six capabilities engineered into the catalogue's daily motion.

Mapping

Automated category mapping

LLM + vector similarity hybrid. Hundreds of thousands of SKUs classified into deep taxonomies at 95%+ accuracy — hours, not months.

Taxonomy

Confidence-scored taxonomy

Every classification carries a calibrated confidence. High-confidence flows through; low-confidence escalates to a reviewer with the right context.

Search

RAG product search

Retrieval-augmented search grounded in your product, policy, and inventory data. Buyers find the right SKU; merchants stop losing demand to bad results.

Merchandising

Agentic merchandising

Multi-agent workflows for category planning, promotion ops, and content QA. Repetitive merch work compressed; merchants spend their time on the calls only they can make.

Forecasting

Demand forecasting

Channel- and seasonality-aware forecasting models tuned on your data — feeding replenishment, promotion planning, and inventory positioning.

Personalisation

Personalisation engines

Real-time recommendation systems that balance discovery against conversion — engineered to operate against your conversion goals, not someone else's benchmark.

Proof

200,000 SKUs into an 8-level taxonomy at 95%+ accuracy.

Customer · mcgrocer.com

200,000 SKUs mapped into an 8-level taxonomy at 95%+ accuracy — engineered with an LLM + vector similarity hybrid, calibrated confidence per classification, and a reviewer flow for the long tail.

Engineered, not procured

Category mapping, RAG search, agentic merchandising, and forecasting — built by an engineering team that ships into the workflow, not a vendor that hands over a slide deck.

CMMI L5·ISO 27001·GDPR·PCI-DSS aware·SOC 2-aligned·UK · EU · US
Engage with us

For catalogues that need accuracy, at speed.

Discovery call within 48 hours. Pilot on a slice of your real catalogue — measurable accuracy, measurable throughput, measurable confidence.