Driving Product Findability Part - 1 - Taxonomy - Amazepxm
                     Driving Product Findability: Part - 1 - Taxonomy
Imagine this, a typical online shopping scenario that customers find themselves in  
more often than one would like. You're looking for a phone case for a particular  
brand of phones. You visit the website hoping to find what you're looking for, and 
do  the most instinctive thing. Navigate. Phones -> Your phone brand -> 
Accessories.
But you don't find any covers here. Your first assumption would be that the 
website  doesn't have phone covers of your particular phone brand.
However, patience prevails and you decide to try your luck with a search query. You 
 scroll through the first couple of pages and finally find the cover for your phone  
brand. While the eventual outcome may seem favorable, this is not what 
particularly  qualifies as a satisfactory buying journey. In fact, present- day 
shoppers have far  less patience, so if they don't find what they're looking for at the 
first attempt, they  move on.
And this is what brings us to our two-part series cracking product findability. 
There  are two primary approaches to finding a product:
1. Browse
2. Search
And more often than not, shoppers use a hybrid of these approaches. Part 1 of our 
 journey to ensuring that customers find your products easily will deal primarily with 
 the 'browse' approach (which, in phases, can also drive the 'search' approach). 
And  this is what brings us to the subject of this part - product taxonomy.
What is Product Taxonomy?
A taxonomy is a structured and indexed framework that is used to categorize  
products in a manner that is intuitive and easy to use. As customers move down  
categories, they find more specific products; and as they go up, they find 
broader,
more generic areas. In other words, taxonomy is the process of categorizing,  
organizing, grouping, and most critically, understanding why the process is 
being  carried out.
Imagine this, a typical online shopping scenario that customers find themselves in  
more often than one would like. You're looking for a phone case for a particular  
brand of phones. You visit the website hoping to find what you're looking for, and 
do  the most instinctive thing. Navigate. Phones -> Your phone brand -> 
Accessories.
But you don't find any covers here. Your first assumption would be that the 
website  doesn't have phone covers of your particular phone brand.
However, patience prevails and you decide to try your luck with a search query. You 
 scroll through the first couple of pages and finally find the cover for your phone  
brand. While the eventual outcome may seem favorable, this is not what 
particularly  qualifies as a satisfactory buying journey. In fact, present- day 
shoppers have far  less patience, so if they don't find what they're looking for at the 
first attempt, they  move on.
And this is what brings us to our two-part series cracking product findability. 
There  are two primary approaches to finding a product:
1. Browse
2. Search
And more often than not, shoppers use a hybrid of these approaches. Part 1 of our 
 journey to ensuring that customers find your products easily will deal primarily with 
 the 'browse' approach (which, in phases, can also drive the 'search' approach). 
And  this is what brings us to the subject of this part - product taxonomy.
What is Product Taxonomy?
A taxonomy is a structured and indexed framework that is used to categorize  
products in a manner that is intuitive and easy to use. As customers move down  
categories, they find more specific products; and as they go up, they find 
broader,  more generic areas. In other words, taxonomy is the process of 
categorizing,  organizing, grouping, and most critically, understanding why the 
process is being  carried out.
It's not just about throwing products together under different categories and calling 
it  a day. Sound taxonomy requires a hybrid approach that demands a strong  
understanding of both, your products and your customers. Here's an example: Your 
 product range might include shirts for boys and girls. The logical way to categorize  
products would be this:
● Apparel -> Boys -> Clothing -> Shirts
● Apparel -> Girls -> Clothing-> Shirts
While this may seem simple, the other way to go about this could also be:
● Apparel -> Clothing -> Shirts -> Boys
● Apparel -> Clothing-> Shirts -> Girls
In a vacuum, both these options may seem reasonable and logical, however, the 
key  here is to understand not just your product types, but also industry norms and  
customer preferences. This is where it becomes critical to take the right call. Then  
again, taxonomy doesn't just affect the 'browsers'; it impacts 'searchers' as well. As  
searchers land on your website, they might directly go to the search bar and look for 
 'boy's shirts'. This is where your categorizing and naming convention, both crucial  
elements of taxonomy, can be just as important.
Product Taxonomy Best Practices
● Leverage customer data
The way customers shop online is always evolving based on trends,  
technology and other factors. The best way to understand these online  
shopping behavioral trends is to test every aspect of your product 
hierarchies  and categories. Look for metrics such as time spent on pages, 
conversion  rates, links clicked, bounce rates etc. to get a better 
understanding of how  your taxonomy is affecting the shopping experience. 
You can do this, by A/B  testing or even surveys if you have a wide enough 
group of responders.
●
Know your products
Easier said than done! While customer-centricity is vital to success in digital  
commerce, an in- depth understanding of your products is equally critical. 
You  must know what attributes of your product drive behavior and how to 
make
the most of them. Towards this, you need to have a few of these 
questions  answered:
●
● What differentiates my product in the market?
● What do customers like about my product?
● What are the industry norms/expectations for similar products in 
terms  of taxonomy?
●
Answer these key questions and you will enable a product-centric 
approach,  and also develop the ability to optimize product datasets for the 
desired  business outcomes.
Optimize for SEO
Product taxonomies can also play a vital role in search. And this applies not  
only to internal site search but search engine performance as well. 
Leveraging  this potential, however, requires you to optimize your taxonomy 
with search  engine optimization (SEO) in mind. This would include the 
inclusion of  elements such as meta content (titles and descriptions), images, 
and keyword  use.
Extensive research and effort on keyword use is appreciated by search  
engines, but also make sure you don't overdo it. The key here is to 
optimize  taxonomy and URLs in a way that makes product discovery 
easier for your  customers; nothing more, nothing less.
●
Frugal and Smart Categorization
If you think your current taxonomy requires your customer to spend more 
time  on navigation than on the actual product, chances are you’ve  
overcategorized. Adding too many subcategories and levels happens when  
one tries to get too specific with categorizing the product. And this is ideally  
not what taxonomy should be about. The ideal depth of your hierarchy should 
 not exceed two to three categories, and the reason for this is the simple  
formula:
●
Lesser clicks to find a product = lower bounce rate
A good way to ensure this is to differentiate attributes vs. sub-categories. For  
example, if your parent category is 'Men's Apparel', and the sub category is  
'Men's Shirts', you're fine. However, if you have another subcategory for 
'Long  Sleeve Shirts', you've made the mistake of taking an attribute and 
converting  it into a subcategory.
Categorize to Reduce Confusion
As customers navigate through your site, the process should be intuitive and  
linear. This means that there should be a clear and unified path for 
customers  to get to the desired product. The key to doing this is to reduce 
duplicate  categories, homogenize nomenclature and avoid categorizing the 
same  product under more than one sub-category. There will, of course, be  
exceptions to these rules. However, more often than not, these factors are  
common amongst most successful taxonomies.
Again, naming your categories correctly is just as important as zeroing down  
on the right hierarchy and relationships. The most basic rule to follow is to 
use  nomenclature that you know your customer is most likely to use. An 
easy way  to identify this is to know your customer, but you would also want 
to keep an  eye on industry norms and best practices to get your 
nomenclature right. For  example, if you're products are for a B2B audience, 
you would want specific,  even technical nomenclature that industry 
customers would understand. On  the other hand, with B2C customers, you 
would want to do away with all  jargon and use the most commonly used 
terms. 'Horses for courses' is the  key here.
●
Following the ‘don’ts’ of Taxonomy and Categorization
Equally important is to avoid a few critical missteps that can render 
product  taxonomies a mess. Here are the common ones to avoid:
● Avoid using the ‘other’ category, because that’s usually not what  
customers are looking for. While we did mention avoiding  
overcategorization, in this case, it just makes more sense to create a  
relevant subcategory for products. Then again, if you think you have  
too many one-off products that don’t necessarily require dedicated  
subcategories, you probably want to rethink the place of the product 
in  your catalog in the first place.
● As far as possible, try avoiding categorizing products to more than 
one  node. Placing products in multiple categories doesn’t just hamper 
the  customer experience, it also messes up stock management, 
product  reporting and purchase orders.
● Similarly, you must also avoid duplication and overlapping of  
categories. Too many choices lead to further confusion, so you 
would  want to make sure you keep things down to a minimum. And 
this is  possible if you categorize correctly. So, instead of having a 
taxonomy  that looks like this:
●
It makes more sense to have one that looks like 
this:
How PIM Drives Product Taxonomy
While getting the logic right to design product taxonomy is critical, you must also 
find  the right tools to execute this logic. And when it comes to categorizing millions 
of  products, the challenge becomes even more daunting. This is where an 
advanced  tool for product information management (PIM) can do the magic. These 
are some  key benefits to finding the right PIM to master taxonomy:
● Data Governance:
With the right PIM tool, you get the benefit of setting data governance rules 
to  make sure your data quality and integrity is always intact. With no need to 
 manually check various data touchpoints, you can easily set a clear and  
objective chain of command.
●
Quality Metrics:
Automated audits of your product data make sure that your taxonomy is  
always in keeping with data standards. With a good PIM, you get the  
advantage of data quality tracking without going through the trouble of 
manual  intervention.
●
Automation and AI:
Automated taxonomy design and categorization sounds like a thing of the  
future, but it’s already here. You can get predesigned taxonomy templates 
to  build catalogs on, and make changes to suit the template to your specific 
 requirements. Similarly, you can bulk categorize millions of products  
automatically and get your products out to your customers faster than ever  
before.
Amaze PXM: Designed to Drive Future-Ready Taxonomy 
 Building & Categorization
As a next-gen PIM solution, Amaze PXM gives you complete control over the  
process of taxonomy building and categorization. Amaze has all the features you  
need to ensure robust governance and high data integrity. In addition to this, it 
offers  futuristic AI-driven recommendations for taxonomy building that make the job 
a  whole lot easier. Not only does it eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel, it also  
directly accelerates time-to-market with automated categorization for countless  
products.
Looking to build the taxonomy for your business’ ascent? Try Amaze: