Is there a good, better and best way to categorize your items on an ecommerce website? I would say yes, definitely. Whether your site has hundreds or thousands of products or thousands of pages doesn’t really matter; the goal is to enable your site visitors to find the information they seek quickly and easily. Let’s look at some strategies for the best navigation experience you can offer your customers.
Top-level categorization
There should be clear top-level categories. There could be only a handful or twenty, depending on how much information you have to spread around. The name of the category does make a big difference. If your site offers books, DVDs or other informational how-to products along with your regular product line, you might have one link titled ‘How-To,’ or ‘Media.’ Maybe ‘Books & More.’ The idea is to avoid naming your link something generic like, ‘Stuff.’ The top level category names should be general enough to encompass what you want them to contain but specific enough that customers immediately know what’s there.
Looking at one of our sites, PondBiz.com, their large and successful pond products site lists 24 categories in the left navigation bar. It could be really annoying to have to click through each category and then click again to get to the products or information within. But their site makes good use of another good usability idea, minimizing clicks.
Minimize Clicks
One way to allow for easy, quick navigation is to keep the site structure somewhat ‘flat’ so users don’t have to click many times to get to products.
The PondBiz.com navigation utilizes popout dynamic menus. Mousing over the navigation links reveals new subcategory options, saving a click.
Another of our sites also uses the click-saving technique in a different way. PrewittsWorkWear.com uses an expandable menu. With this option, a little plus sign appears next to the main categories that have subcategories within them. Clicking the plus to the left of ‘Specialty’ reveals sub-menus for ‘Flame-Resistant’ and ‘High-Visibility’ work wear. This does involve an extra click to open the subcategories, but it is another way to keep navigation tighter, and some people don’t like to chase the expandable menus.
Give More Ways to Shop
MightyMerchant’s site manager allows the option to set up different category structures to give visitors more ways to shop. For example, it can be easy to set up Shop by Manufacturer, Shop by Brand, Shop by Season, Special Discounts, or Shop by Theme, as just a few examples.
LearningServicesUS.com is one of our sites with a huge product catalog of educational materials for teachers. They utilize the same dynamic pop-outs for navigation that PondBiz uses, but what I want you to notice on this site is that they have a regular search but also cross-category searches. These narrow down searches by subject, manufacturer, and grade level. If your catalog is huge, or even if it’s not and you just have multiple brands, provide multiple ways for people to find what they’re looking for.
The important thing is to think of the experience for the customer. We want to have navigation that allows customers to have a good experience that makes it easy to find items, but not be split up or mashed together to the point that it’s silly. It doesn’t make sense to have one category with only two or three items inside, and neither does it make sense to have too few categories with many items inside.
Posted on March 4th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Web Design and Usability
I have my catalog set up where the customer can shop by brand name and by game table type. Sometimes I wonder if listing them by type and price would not be better?
Hi Anthony, Thanks for checking out our blog! After looking at SuperBubbleHockey.com I don’t necessarily think you should list by price instead of by game because I think most people would be searching for a particular type of game. But it would be good to have people be able to search by a variety of categories, so maybe a search by price or brand within a game category would be the way to go.