A very common question we receive from users is whether they can manually force a specific product into the 'A', 'B', or 'C' category to change its purchasing advice.

The short answer is no: unfortunately, it is not possible to manually classify a product. Optiply is designed to be a purely data-driven system. The algorithm automatically categorises your entire catalogue based on mathematical performance to remove human bias and ensure optimal inventory levels. However, if you feel your products are falling into the wrong categories, you can tweak the underlying rules that dictate how the system sorts them!

Here is how you can adjust your settings to influence your product classification.

While you cannot move an individual product, you can change the size of the "buckets" the products fall into. By default, the categories are distributed based on Gross Margin.

If you lower the percentage threshold of the 'C-category', the products that were on the borderline will automatically be pushed up into the 'B-category'.

How to change this:

If classifying by Gross Margin does not fit your business model (for example, if you sell high volumes of low-margin items that you still consider your most important 'A' products), you can change the foundational metric used for the calculation.

You can tell Optiply to calculate the ABC category based on the Number of sales order lines instead of the Gross Margin.

How to change this:

Once you save these changes, Optiply will automatically recalculate your entire catalogue overnight based on your new rules!

Inventory management is dynamic. A product that is a top-selling 'A' item today might naturally decline into a 'C' item in six months. If users were allowed to manually "lock" products into categories, the system would eventually order too much (or too little) stock as the product's real-world lifecycle changes.

Changing the calculation metric from Gross Margin to Sell Order Lines is a major structural change. It will completely shuffle your product categories overnight. We recommend making this change carefully, as it will significantly alter your baseline purchase advice and desired service levels!

Yes! If you are trying to move a product to the 'C' category simply because you want to stop ordering it, the better approach is to change the product's status to Phased Out on the Products page.