Kaleidoguide is a product catalog built by Bonanza.com to organize items that don't have unique identifiers like UPC, ISBN, or MPN codes. To our knowledge, a catalog that works without unique identifiers has never existed before now.

Why did we bother? Because special things happen when reams of item data are structured and organized. Amazon's catalog was the first proof of what a catalog can provide. Thanks to their catalog, product reviews and "items purchased with this" are now seen as basic privileges of shopping online.

But so far, these benefits have been restricted only to the mass-produced products with UPC, ISBN or MPN codes.

Artisan products earn trust from product reviews

For starters, Kaleidoguide will provide product reviews and laser-focused item recommendations for a whole new class of items. You can now buy artisan, rare, and collectible items, plus items without packaging, with the same confidence you buy commodity items from Amazon.

Beyond product reviews, Kaleidoguide is a chance for us to help buyers discover the best products from small, creative brands that don't register on Amazon's radar. Kaleidoguide will give entrepreneurs and artisans the sort of exposure that is usually reserved for big brands.

How does it work?

Short answer: it's complicated. Why do you think its taken us years to build it? But since you asked...

Traditional catalogs use a unique identifier, such as an ISBN number, to index their merchandise. Because most of our sellers' merchandise don't have these unique identifiers (even when they do, they are usually long lost on the packaging that the item once came in), Kaleidoguide instead uses keywords from an item to piece together its unique identity.

The most common pattern for Kaleidoguide entries is "Brand" + "What it is." For example:

Kaleidoguide at work, cataloging an artisan cabinet

That's the easy part (well, not that easy since there are about a million Brands and "What is its" currently known to Kaleidoguide, with hundreds added daily). Some of the trickier cases that Kaleidoguide automatically handles include:

• How to get more specific about what the item is than simply its brand? We have multiple levels of detail available to each catalog entry, depending on how much detail is provided by the seller.
• How to disambiguate between "American" the company and "American" the manufacturing location? Hint: context. Kaleidoguide uses a natural language parser similar to how humans interpret context during speech.
• What to do when there are multiple brands or things that might apply to an item? We can't give away all our secrets.

I'm a Bonanza seller, how do I get included in Kaleidoguide?

Post your items for sale, we take care of the rest. The system has been designed from the ground up to be able to understand what your item is without any special intervention from you. Once your items are posted, we'll automatically link them to the correct entries in Kaleidoguide. If you're a merchant who creates their own products, go to Selling Dashboard -> Booth Management -> "Manage Your Brand" to register your brand (including brand logo and description) with Kaleidoguide.

I run my own website. Can I use Kaleidoguide to associate product reviews with my merchandise?

Absolutely. We are actively building tools & widgets to take Kaleidoguide on the go, so yours (or any) website can benefit from the product reviews, pinpoint recommendations, and contextual metadata that Kaleidoguide provides. Numerous studies have indicated that product reviews are one of the primary factors that buyers consider before hitting the "buy" button.

Please email us at api -at- bonanza.com for more details.