When you visit a retail website and find yourself thinking it’s a pleasant experience, that’s not by accident. In fact, you’re being guided by a well-designed website structure known as product taxonomy. Different types of products are organized and categorized together so that you can find what you want.
What is product taxonomy?
Product taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system used to organize and categorize products within an ecommerce platform. This structure typically includes categories, subcategories, and attributes, enhancing navigation and searchability. Implementing a clear taxonomy aids in improving user experience and optimizing SEO, making it easier for customers to find relevant products quickly.
The goal is to arrange products in a clear hierarchy that customers find familiar and can intuitively navigate. For instance, in an online retailer’s clothing category, shoppers expect to find men’s and women’s subcategories with categories for tops, bottoms, swimwear, etc. nested within. A taxonomy also includes product attributes, which are descriptions of particular products. In men’s pants, for example, attributes would be size, color, material, and style.
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Benefits of product taxonomy
Setting up a smart product taxonomy can benefit a business and its customers in several ways:
Easy browsing
There are two kinds of ecommerce shoppers: browsers and searchers. A browser is someone who peruses a website, perhaps not looking for anything in particular but is ready to be enticed. Browsing is like window shopping or strolling through a real store.
Customers who browse should experience smooth navigation of your website, moving through product categories and subcategories that are organized in a logical way. This may encourage them to buy individual products, become repeat customers, and recommend your site to others.
Improved SEO
Searchers are goal-oriented shoppers. They have a specific product in mind and usually don’t want to spend much time working through a website. A searcher is more likely to bypass the website menu and go right to the search bar, typing in keywords or phrases for the desired product.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about choosing the right keywords and phrases to produce the most appropriate results from search engines that scour the internet. A good product taxonomy that makes prominent use of relevant search terms will help rank your website high among internet search results.
Increased sales
This is the big goal of a smart product taxonomy—getting more online shoppers to click the “Add to Cart” button and buy your products. Ecommerce companies closely track conversion rate, which in this case is the percentage of browsers and searchers who follow through with a purchase. A smart and intuitive product taxonomy can help you increase your conversion rate and build customer loyalty.
Customer insights
Learn how customers use your site, what products interest them, and how much they are willing to spend by tracking their movements through your product taxonomy. This can influence any changes you make to your product lineup and how they are classified, including which products to promote and which to stop selling.
Better internal reporting
A good taxonomy with clear and distinct product categories aids accurate sales reporting and analysis. For example, a clothing retailer can track and compare sales of menswear against women's wear, or within women’s wear, compare sales between two different types of products. This helps the retailer make decisions about its online product mix based on hard data, instead of impressions or hunches about the products.
Product taxonomy best practices
Retailers and other businesses can make product taxonomy work for them by following some guidelines and best practices:
Focus on customers
Use tracking data to assess how shoppers browse your online store. Provide accessible alternatives if the specific products they seek aren’t available. By keeping a history of customers’ previous purchases and preferences, you can tweak your product taxonomy to personalize their shopping experience, with categories such as “Your Favorites” and “Best Sellers.”
Keep it simple
Design a taxonomy of categories so that browsers can discover products with just a few clicks. A complicated or unorganized taxonomy that makes shoppers go beyond three or four clicks down your category tree can discourage shoppers. Some may give up and go elsewhere to shop.
Use sensible SEO terms
Stick to words or phrases familiar to shoppers, rather than technical or formal terms used among industry insiders. Be sure to link different keywords or phrases that refer to the same product so that shoppers can still easily find it. Under women’s clothing, for instance, in the pants category, capri pants may also be called three-quarter pants. Searching any one of these names should show the same products.
Be ready to adjust
Products change and so do consumer tastes. When this inevitably happens, your taxonomy will need revisions, requiring different product categorization. Let’s say an online consumer electronics retailer has a main category for computers, under which two subcategories appear, desktops and laptops. As more shoppers want laptops rather than desktops, the retailer drops the computers category and makes laptops and desktops each a main category. That way, the option to shop for laptops is clearly visible from the homepage.
Product taxonomy FAQ
What is the product taxonomy structure?
Product taxonomy structure is the way an online business logically organizes the products it sells, so that customers can find them on its ecommerce website. The goal of a well-constructed taxonomy is for customers to discover and buy the products with just a few clicks, or with the fewest keyword searches.
Why is product taxonomy important?
By making it easy to find products online, a smart taxonomy can boost your sales by encouraging shoppers to stay on the website longer, increasing the chance they will buy something. It also can encourage them to become repeat customers after a satisfactory first experience.
What is an example of product taxonomy?
One example of product taxonomy might be for an online catalog of consumer electronics. The main categories might be computers and phones. Under the computer category, laptops and desktops are subcategories. Beneath each subcategory are brands with their respective attributes including processor chip speed, memory, data storage capacity, screen size, and cost.
