eCommerce Product Taxonomy

Picture yourself in your local grocery store with a list of items in your hand: oranges, milk, rice and dog food. As you make your way throughout the store, you head to the produce section, the dairy aisle, the pantry goods, and the pet section.

The shopping trip is easily done because all of the products within the store are properly organized by product category – oranges in the produce section, milk in the dairy aisle, and so on.

But if the store were a disorganized mess, with pet food beside the baked goods and rice at the butcher counter, you’d likely feel annoyed enough to leave the store without purchasing anything.

The same goes for an eCommerce environment. In order for an online store to be easily shoppable and deliver a positive customer experience, it needs to be properly organized with clean and classified product data. This is where eCommerce product taxonomy comes in.

What is Product Taxonomy?

Simply put, product taxonomy is the logical and structural organization of a company’s products within a hierarchy of categories and attribute values. It is the structuring of your website from both the backend (called your collection taxonomy) and the frontend (called your presentation taxonomy).

Collection Taxonomy

Collection taxonomy is the collection, standardization, categorization and organization of products including their attributes and values. It helps your team establish a standardized way of collecting product data from your vendor partners.

Presentation Taxonomy

Presentation taxonomy is the front-end categorization and website hierarchy including navigation-level product categories, sub-categories, parametric filtering, and more. It helps simplify how your customers find products on your website.

Why is Product Taxonomy Important?

Product taxonomy is critical to your eCommerce site’s function because it ensures your products are easily shoppable. Amazon Web Services states that 88% of online shoppers would not return to a website after having a poor experience. A great product taxonomy is a key component of a positive user experience and a driver of sales.

What Comprises a Taxonomy?

When developing a product taxonomy, there are a number of key elements included.

Hierarchy Tree: This is the actual arrangement of product categories, sorted into levels of classification. For example, Electronics (Level 1) > Computers (Level 2) > Computer Accessories (Level 3) > Cables & Chargers (Level 4).

Attributes: These are the characteristics used to help refine types of products within a category. For example, an attribute for a computer could be its operating system, hard drive type, or memory.

Values: Every attribute has a list of values associated with it. These values help define the type of product a customer is looking for. For example, within the attribute of Operating System, a list of values could include macOS, Windows 11, Chrome OS, etc.

Aliases: Aliases are synonyms for products or categories, used to help make your inventory accessible to various audiences, and to help deliver a better user experience. For example, a customer looking for a laptop may also use the term “notebook.”

How Do We Get There?

Developing a product taxonomy can be a large undertaking, but luckily, we offer a number of services to help support your needs as a retailer including full taxonomy creation, product classification, data aggregation, data cleansing, and product data migration.

Learn more about our services here and check out our blog series where we dive deeper into each one.