We’ve made a big change to the vendor portal and the iOS & Android app: you’ll now see category labels for your sold items, automatically created by Quail. These don’t always show up immediately – sometimes it takes us a while to figure them out! – but items should automatically get a category label usually in the first few hours after they sell.

These labels are 100% automatic, which of course means that they might be wrong! We’ve done our best to make sure they’re helpful, but with the incredibly wild variety of what folks sell through Quail that…hasn’t been easy. If you don’t find the category labels useful you can turn ‘em off; it’s a single switch in the in-app settings. We’ve defaulted them to on because we think they’re pretty neat, but we know they won’t be for everybody.

We have more plans for how to use these category labels to help you better work your booth, but for now we’ve put in a couple of useful charts in the portal and apps. These will show you the breakdown of your sales (by number of items and by dollar amount) across different categories, which might help you decide what to restock your booth with. Are you selling more smalls than you think? Should you double-down on big furniture pieces?

Hopefully we can help you find the answer!

The categorizer also learns from your category labels, so if you want to add your own categories or change the automatically-assigned ones, you can do that and future items will take your changes into account.

I know some folks will look at these and say “get that AI out of here!”, and honestly, we can’t disagree. But in this case we’re not just throwing your sales data over the wall into ChatGPT; instead, we’re categorizing every vendor’s item sales separately, using systems we’ve designed, built, and hosted ourselves. Your sales data never leaves Quail’s servers. We’re not just putting these into an LLM and crossing our fingers; we’ve done a lot of work (one of us literally wrote his PhD on this!) to generate these categories in a way that respects your privacy and doesn’t just feed the global AI machine.

(We’re pretty sure Terminator was meant to be an action flick, not a documentary.)