In Part 1 of this Section, we covered some of the data that you need to get together to create an E-commerce site. This article goes into more detail about creating product categories, hierarchies and taxonomies.
Product Categories
In many cases, your product categories will dictate the navigation of the site. Your Menus use your categories to help consumers find what they are looking for in the most intuitive way.
Ecommerce taxonomies typically have a separate hierarchy for each ‘department’ in a offline sense or for each broad product category. An Ecommerce store may have:
- 5 – 20 top categories or hierarchies.
- Hierarchy depth of 3 – 4 levels.
- 3 – 20 terms or subcategories per level.
Categories are different from attributes or facets. A category is usually a noun, e.g. Hat, while attributes are adjectives, e.g. Blue
Things to Think About
How to deal with Multiple Categorisation and Cross-over products?
An example of multiple categorisation
• Men’s Shoes – in Men’s Clothing; in Shoes
• Office Furniture – in Office Products; in Furniture
An exemple of cross-over products
• Home Theater – in TV/Video; in Audio/Stereo
• Printer-Scanner-Copier – in Printers; in Scanners; in Copiers
One solution could be to list products in both locations, creating a Polyhierarchy, however too much polyhierarchy confuses the tree structure and some platforms might not support this. There can be UI issues associated with this too as the breadcrumb trail in the navigation may not be dynamic.
Using Industry or Competitors for determining tree structure.
Not all retailers are alike, even though they might be competitors. Different merchants have different strategies, appeal to different customers and might want to promote different products. Some merchants may also be constrained by their platform as to how flexible they can be with categories and you may be able to do it differently.
You may purposefully differentiate yourself by the way you arrange your categories. Perhaps you have insight into the way your customers shop that turns the accepted categorisation on its head.
Using your Store Layout and Categories online
It may be tempting to use the same organisational structure that you use in a physical store, however online shoppers have different constraints and needs. With an Omnichannel mindset, it might make sense to mirror the organisation of store and website, however this needs to be weighed against the online user journey being very different.
There are reasons why physical stores are merchandised the way they are. Some of these can be copied online, but others don’t make sense.
Remember when Supermarkets used to put the milk and bread down the back to force you to walk past other things? This won’t work for Ecommerce. However the practice of highlighting new or promoted products at the front of the store can be replicated.
Pro Tips
Creating categories is not as simple as it might first appear, take time at the beginning of a project to get it right, as categories might be hard to change later, especially if you have a large catalog.
Taxonomy design may be constrained by business practices, but the customer perspective should be the major consideration. Test, and use data to show which category structure is more intuitive and leads to higher conversion.
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