Show HN: 30k IKEA items in flat text

Hacker News (score: 32)
Found: January 07, 2026
ID: 2978

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Show HN: 30k IKEA items in flat text OP here.

I took the unofficial IKEA US dataset (originally scraped by jeffreyszhou) and converted all 30,511 products into a flat, markdown-like protocol called CommerceTXT.

The goal: See if a flatter structure is more efficient for LLM context windows.

The results: - Size: 30k products across 632 categories. - Efficiency: The text version uses ~24% fewer tokens (3.6M saved total) compared to the equivalent minified JSON. - Structure: Files are organized in folders (e.g. /products/category/), which helps with testing hierarchical retrieval routers.

The link goes to the dataset on Hugging Face which has the full benchmarks.

Parser code is here: https://github.com/commercetxt/commercetxt

Happy to answer questions about the conversion logic!

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