How to organize the categories of an online store
The organization of your online store is vital for the good operation and usability of your buyers. A good categorization of products or services will make it easier for users to buy.
Therefore, you should not be in a hurry when deciding how to organize your online store, below we give you some guidelines to choose the best categorization:
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Watch your competition and successful online stores: it is important before you start looking at the online stores of your sector and the most successful stores such as Amazon, ebay, aliexpress, alibaba, rakuten, etc. Using a similar structure will help users to find your products more easily, because they will already know the structure of the store. As when you go to a new home appliance store, they all follow a similarity, because when buyers come in, it's easy to locate the product you are looking for. Well, like e-commerce.
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Sections of your physical store: In case you have a physical store you can also look at the different sections of your physical store and the way you have it structured.
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Few main categories: It is recommended to look for 5 or 6 main categories that can include all the products or services that we want to sell online. If we give many options, the user may have trouble knowing where to find their product.
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The main categories must be easy to distinguish: The categories must have a logical meaning and at the same time must be understandable to the user. Therefore, we should try to avoid technical terms at least that our user profile knows the language well. If we return in the case of household appliances, it could be distributed: Image and sound; computer and telephony; Home; Beauty and health; Entertainment and sports; Offers
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A product feature is not a category: When a product may have several sizes, colors, brands, etc. We will not put them as a category but as a filter to help the user to look for that particularity of the product. For example: Televisions less than 27 inches, 28 to 32 inches, 40 to 43 inches, etc. or brands like Sony, Samsung, LG, etc. These features will be put as filters.
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Structure of menus of categories of maximum three levels: it is recommended that at most there are three levels: category, subcategory level 1 and subcategory level 2. That the user finds their goal at most with three clicks. If you can not avoid many levels of categories, it is best to do a "Mega Menu".
Following the previous example:
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Main categories: Image and sound; computer and telephony; Home; Beauty and health; Entertainment and Sports and Offers
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Subcategories level 1 (Image and sound): television; supports; video; photography; audio; hi-fi and speakers
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Subcategories level 2 (television): televisions; internet TV / TDT / satellite; projectors; DVD / blue-ray players; TV antennas; remote controls; connectors and cables.
Once we have clear the basics we recommend that you draw an outline with the categories and subcategories to visualize the structure that will have your store online.