Earlier this year we introduced the concept of labels to ChannelAdvisor Complete. In our current implementation, labels are a way to dynamically group inventory items together. But why did we choose to do this? Why is this useful?

You might hear labels referred to as tags on other web destinations. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail popularized their use as a flexible way to organize information. They are short, free text descriptors that you assign to a piece of information so you can group it together with other similar data. For instance on Flickr you can label all your photos of your kid’s soccer games with “soccer” and search on that keyword later to find them all. Or you can have Gmail automatically label your incoming e-mails from specific people with “Chicago” to find messages from all of your friends who live there.

Currently labels in ChannelAdvisor are used to group inventory items together. You can use labels to tag your items as “clearance” for example. Or you can label a set of inventory as “holiday” items. Or you can mark some inventory as both “clearance” and “holiday” - you can assign as many labels as you like to an item!

Once you have labels on inventory, you can filter it by label in the All Items view. This enables you to segment your inventory and operate on just that subset of your items.

So why use labels when you can just group inventory together with ChannelAdvisor’s classifications? For one thing, an item can only belong to one classification at a time. Classifications are good for a general category such as “men’s boots”. But if you want to segment your inventory as clearance items across many classifications (say, “men’s boots” and “women’s boots”) you are better off using a clearance label to accomplish this.

Then what about inventory attributes? Why not just set one of the user defined inventory fields to mark items as “clearance”? These custom attributes are designed more for name/value pairs that further describe the item. Things like size, color, condition, etc. Plus, you can’t segment your inventory based on attributes.

Another advantage of labels is that you don’t have to go through all of your inventory and manually assign them to each item. By leveraging the power of our advanced filters, you can have a label applied automatically to all the inventory that matches the criteria set in the filter. For instance, you could set up an advanced filter to look at items whose price is less than $100 and then in the label definition tell it to automatically apply to the items in the filter.

You are also welcome to manually add or remove the label for individual items and our system will remember your preferences.

Labels are central to some of our more recent offerings, such as listing on Overstock.com. In order to send inventory to that marketplace, you tell the system to pull all inventory that has a certain label associated with it. This gives you a flexible way to tag the inventory you want to appear on Overstock without having to mess with classifications or any other grouping mechanism.

By using labels in ChannelAdvisor Complete you have a simple, effective way to tag inventory and operate on it in segments. In the future we plan on expanding labels to other types of information such as buyers and orders.

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