Imagine you’re at a friend’s house helping to put together a new piece of furniture. Your friend asks you to go to the garage and get a wrench. Easy enough task, right? You know what a wrench looks like.
You go to the garage, only to find all the tools in one giant pile on the workbench. You see all manner of screwdrivers and hammers, but no wrenches. After searching and digging through the pile, you simply give up. Wouldn’t it be easier if these were organized in some way?
That’s what an effective taxonomy offers. Imagine that same task, but instead of finding a pile of tools, you enter the garage to find neatly organized drawers, each clearly labeled with that drawer’s contents. Finding a wrench will be as simple as finding the drawer labeled “wrenches” and choosing the one that suits your needs.
For an ecommerce website, a well-thought-out taxonomy is critical to your ecommerce success. In the above example, the frustration of trying to find a wrench in a messy pile could lead one to give up. Imagine how your customers feel when they can’t find what they’re looking for on your site.
Yes, other elements of an ecommerce site—such as compelling photography and clear, concise descriptions—are important. But the ability to quickly find the specific item you’re looking for plays just as large a role in the success or failure of your ecommerce platform.
Classifying Data to Find Answers Faster
Let’s look back on our tool example. While the worst-case scenario is to have all the tools in one large pile, the more detailed your taxonomy is, the quicker it is to find the exact tool you’re looking for.
After all, a wrench is just a wrench, right?
Except there’s all different types of wrenches. Pipe wrenches, crescent wrenches, speed wrenches… the more detailed you get with your classification system, the quicker you can find what you need.
So rather than simply having a single drawer labeled “wrenches,” you have a separate drawer for each type of wrench. And then within those drawers, you have them divided out further by sizes. A five-minute task digging through a pile can be cut down to nearly five seconds using a more detailed classification system.
Layers of Data Yield More Specific Results
Consider shopping online for a pair of shoes to understand how layering taxonomy can work.
A structural diagram of your taxonomy should resemble a family tree. At the top, the broadest category possible is the widest blanket term that can be applied to everything below it. In this case, “shoes.”
Your next level can then divide your products into who those that are intended for: men, women, or children. Under each of those subdivisions, you can create another layer for the particular style of shoes. Below that, you add a layer for the brand or manufacturer.
Eventually, you’ve added enough layers so that your customer who’s been looking for those ladies’ hot-pink high-top sneakers in size 8 can quickly find exactly what they want. At each step in the process, you’re adding different ways of filtering out your offerings.
Your taxonomy should focus on your customer’s intent in order to allow them to quickly locate the exact product they’re looking for. And reducing the amount of friction between your customer and the specific product they want is the key to ensuring your customer buys from your site instead of your competitors.
Tips to Improve Your Taxonomy
It’s a good practice to routinely revisit your taxonomy, especially as your product offerings evolve. Because you’re seeking to classify your products based on specific characteristics that your customers are searching for, you may run into instances where your taxonomy needs to add or remove new categories.
Some additional thoughts to consider when evaluating your taxonomy:
- Evaluate the search criteria your customers use to find your site. If you see a large amount of traffic aimed at one specific search term, make sure you have a category specifically dedicated to that term.
- Review what products you have in each classification. Chances are, if you only have one product in a specific category, it’s too specific and thus unnecessary. If the goal is to minimize the number of steps your customer takes to find the product they need, don’t add needless layers to your taxonomy.
- Test your data and structure. If you can achieve the same sales results without an additional layer of classification, you probably didn’t need it anyway.
Keep a record of the changes you make and tests you run. If you find a change has a detrimental effect, you know how to change it back to a way that works.
You Have Your Taxonomy. Now What?
Building out your taxonomy should help you organize your products within your PIM. This helps guide your product engineers in the creation of new products as well by integrating the data in your PLM with your PIM.
Contact us today to help improve your overall ecommerce presence. We can help create systems that will allow your products to stand out from your competitors and capture the overall marketplace.
