To compete in the crowded, fragmented world of modern digital marketing, you must be able to control your clients’ experience.
Customers are inundated with options, but they know exactly what they want: relevant information delivered in a coordinated, tailored process. If your customers do not understand, they will go elsewhere.
A well-designed product taxonomy benefits your customers and business in the long run. It is essential to highlight that effective taxonomies consider a customer’s environment. Customer behavior, trends, rivals, and other factors all impact product classification.
In this guide, we’ll bring you through the seven steps to creating an effective, strategic plan for your product taxonomy. Understand these seven suggestions for optimizing your product hierarchy.
What Exactly Is Online Store Taxonomy?
To comprehend what online store taxonomy is, we must first understand the definition of product taxonomy.
For a long time, the term “taxonomy” has been used in libraries. Product taxonomy or product classification, on the other hand, refers to a logical and hierarchical structure of products in online shopping. It entails categorizing and structuring your products in a way that allows for rational and convenient product navigation.
Online store taxonomy and organization are defined similarly. It essentially refers to organizing, categorizing, and comprehending why this is done.
As a result, you must do more than just categorize your products and call them a day. Instead, product taxonomy demands a profound knowledge of your products and a reasonable strategy to list them on this eCommerce giant.
The Ecommerce Taxonomy Is Divided Into Two Parts:
Product Hierarchy or Category Tree
A category tree groups your objects by form and function in order. The tree is organized top-down, with distinct tiers indicating the link between different product categories.
Product Characteristics or Dimensions
Each product property has a unique value, and a single attribute can be applied to many categories. You can mix different features and use them as filters while looking for products in the store.
The purpose of online store taxonomy is to organize all accessible information rationally so shoppers can discover the needed items with the fewest clicks. Consequently, buyers may easily navigate the category tree using the appropriate attribute filters.
Understanding the relationship between categories and product qualities is critical to showing your products logically to customers.
Taxonomy Best Practices for Online Stores
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for placing your products within the Online store taxonomy. Instead, you must identify and classify your target audience, industry, and search engines.
The following are some best practices for Product category taxonomy:
Recognize Your Target Audience
Customers are everything in today’s highly competitive eCommerce environment. You must understand who you sell to and what motivates them to purchase your things on an ecommerce platform. The best thing to do is to outsource the eCommerce call center.
Speaking to your customers through call center solutions, doing user experience testing, analyzing the audience’s behavior in real time, and investigating rival trends are all tried and tested methods for recognizing your target audience.
With this understanding, you may be able to generate the required traffic and earnings.
Understand Your Products
Understanding the relationship between your clients and what you sell is fundamental to eCommerce success. Answering the following questions can help with this:
- What features of your items pique the interest of your customers?
- How can you explain your products’ unique selling characteristics (USPs)?
- What language or search terms do clients use to find similar products?
Allow for Content Versatility
eCommerce taxonomy cannot be set in stone. It’s a never-ending procedure that necessitates expert knowledge and experience. Furthermore, you may need to adjust your strategy in response to changing trends or introducing a new product.
So, it’s ideal to implement the plan in stages while testing and assessing every effect before the full-fledged execution.
Here Are the Seven Practices to Establish a High-Quality Product Taxonomy:
1. Investigate the Competition
It is critical to understand how the best-in-class merchants in your target industry classify their products. Customers want your site to function similarly to the other sites they visit. Because product taxonomy is not standardized, each company will take its approach. Optimize your competitive set for the optimum combination of category selections.
2. Recognize Your Product Offering
Most customers compare other products with different attributes when considering a product purchase. Build your category and attribute framework based on understanding what product features are significant to your buyers. For example, our Makeup category has a Skin Complexion property to help clients find makeup products that complement their skin tone.
3. Prevent Over-Categorization
An intelligible category tree has 3 to 5 layers of hierarchy depth and no more than 15 alternatives at the lowest level of the hierarchy. You have too many if a buyer clicks into groups and sublevels before seeing genuine products.
Use product attributes and filters to your advantage if you have a vast inventory. Categories assist customers in finding products via navigation or search when call center solutions are not present. Attributes use product descriptors and details to reduce the number of options further.
4. Do Not Mix up Categories and Qualities
Categories are groupings that aid in product definition, whereas attributes are characteristics that describe items. If the qualification may be used in additional categories (for example, ‘red’ or ‘cotton’ it should be declared as an attribute.
5. Appropriately Name Your Categories and Attributes
Consider yourself in your client’s shoes and strive to keep your language basic, unambiguous, and distinct across different values and levels. Avoid using “Other” as a category or attribute since it appears too ambiguous.
6. Place a Product in No More than One Category
A product cannot be in more than one category in an internal category tree since this causes product reporting issues. Exposing the same product in many categories on a website, on the other hand, can drive more sales.
Consider a trekking backpack, which might be displayed under Bags and Sports Equipment. Internally, this item would be categorized under Bags alone.
7. Testing, Testing, Testing
Examine how your clients shop and traverse your product taxonomy. Are your categories and attributes appealing to your target audience? Are you using the correct search phrases and keywords? There are any gaps in your client’s journey?
Customers will leave a page if they are still looking for what they want. We recommend using Optimal Workshop’s tree testing program to validate your category tree.
Start Working on Your Product Taxonomy With The Help of Experts
The best product taxonomies are not fixed. They are constantly tested and updated. New items are continually being introduced into the retail sector, necessitating the development of new categories and qualities.
There are no hard and fast standards for product taxonomy. To provide a dynamic and intelligible categorization system, remember your customers and your business’s needs.
Vserve, a leading full-service eCommerce support agency, provides various product data management services, including product taxonomy development, to different eCommerce firms. Contact us today to know more!
If you have questions about building an effective B2B Product Taxonomy, don’t hesitate to ask us. Comment down below, and our author will gladly answer your questions!
