How great is it to browse the product categories of an eshop, quickly find what you are looking for and complete your purchase easily & quickly?
On the other hand, how frustrating is it to click all over the e-shop before you think you have found the “right” product, only to discover you have to click about a hundred more times, or worse, that you cannot find it anywhere in the online shop you are browsing?
E-commerce websites, the so-called e-shops, need a strong UX (user experience) to succeed. A large part of the UX of an e-commerce site comes down to categorising your products correctly. If you get your product categories right, you will have a great UX… and, of course, more sales!
How to Set Up the Product Categories in Your Eshop
Before we talk about rules and techniques, the first thing to do is look at your products. Which products do you want to have in your e-shop?
1) Avoid over-categorising!
Too many categories, categories with cryptic names, categories with hardly any products in them: all of these confuse and frustrate shoppers and could easily put them off buying from you.
Using filters is key to good categorisation
There is a tendency among e-shops, instead of taking the time to categorise accurately, to over-subcategorise (that is, to create layer upon layer of subcategories) and to filter products, instead of throwing things onto the site as a category. Not everything needs a category of its own, though.
Remember this: filters should be your friend.
Category or Filter?
Product categories are the main way your products differ from each other. For example, let’s say you sell women’s clothing online. Your categories might be:
- Tops
- Jumpers
- Trousers
- Dresses
- Jackets
- Accessories
Or you might organise them by clothing style:
- Business
- Casual
- Sportswear
- Formal
Or perhaps by customer type:
- Juniors
- Petites
- Misses
- Plus Size
It is important to define your product categories based on the persona you are targeting as a customer.
Now you may say that everyone is a potential customer. And I will answer you the same way I answer when it comes to advertising. Anyone can be your customer, but is it worth spending ad budget on everyone? Will every type of customer bring you the same result, or will some bring more?
Filters
Filters let you narrow down the items in a category based on specific attributes. Let’s say that in your women’s clothing e-shop you sell a range of tops, such as crop tops, graphic tees, henleys and T-shirts. These should not be categories. They should be filters within the broader Tops category we mentioned above.
A user can only choose one product category at a time, so if they are looking for blouses and graphic tees, you don’t want to force them to click through to both. Filters are not mutually exclusive. Users can pick several filters and combine them to see more of the products they are after. In other words, I can choose 2 of the 5 filter options and see exactly what interests me.
Delete categories
If you have only a few products in a particular category (compared with your others), that is a sign you may not need that category at all.
You can run what is called a shared test: if the product attributes are the same across different product types, then that set of product types should (usually) be implemented as filters.
2) Know your potential customer!
E-commerce sites are all about UX. How well (or badly) you categorise your products will decide how long a user stays on your site and whether they end up sealing the deal with a purchase.
Knowing your target customer will guide you on how to structure your categories, because you will know exactly what they are looking for and the terms they use to describe it.
Speaking of which, make sure you categorise the products in your e-shop using the terms your customers use. It may differ from the correct or technical term used in your industry. Who cares? If it is not the term your target market uses, you will lose customers.
Finally, keep in mind that the more pages a user has to visit, the lower the chance they will buy. A popular suggestion is to follow the Rule of 3: don’t make users click more than three times to reach the products they want
3) Use analytics
Nobody can hand you a ready-made recipe for successful categorisation. There is no single correct rule for building the right product categories for your e-shop
The beautiful thing about websites, e-commerce, Google Ads campaigns and so on is that nothing has to stay fixed: everything can change all the time. You can always adjust, tweak or completely change course, and of course change your product categories too!
The best way to find out whether your current approach is the right one is to use analytics. (usually Google Analytics 4)
You will see (among other things) how many visitors you get, what people click on, how long they stay on each page and whether or not they buy from you. If a product category has had no purchases, or very few, for a whole year, could something be wrong? What if users don’t stay at all in some categories and leave straight away for another?
This way you can categorise your products properly and also change parts of your website.
Building an e-shop is an ongoing process of improvement, and it does not stop the moment the build is finished.
Good decisions, or decisions that make sense, are only made after analysing data. If you want to make the right call on removing or adding a category or filter, you need a large volume of data that supports that decision.
We described what an e-shop needs in an earlier article, where we compared it to caring for an orchid.
A Different Approach to Categorisation: Card Sorting
Perhaps the most accurate categorisation technique, which still does not replace everything above, is card sorting.
In short, with this technique we let our potential customers tell us what they expect from us when it comes to categorisation. This is of course the most sensible approach, since the product categories are created for them!
Here is an interesting link that describes the process:
In our view this is the most accurate method, though for small businesses in Greece it is usually hard to carry out because of limited time and resources.
We believe product categorisation is one of the most important parts of your e-shop, and it may be worth investing some money in this alone.
Is It Time to Reorganise Your Categories?
Having read all of the above, you are to some extent ready to categorise your products and start building your e-shop, or, if you already have an e-shop, to change its product categories for the better!
Leave a comment