Product taxonomy: organising a catalog so customers can find things
Taxonomy is the structure behind your catalog: categories, subcategories, attributes and the relationships between them. Customers never see the word, but they feel the result. A good structure lets them reach the right product in a few clicks. A poor one sends them to search, and if search fails too, to another store.
Principles of a good category structure
Build categories around how people shop, not around how suppliers or the warehouse classify goods. Two or three levels are usually enough; deeper trees hide products. A product can appear in collections and filters, but it needs one clear main category.
Watch the balance. A category with three products and one with three thousand both suggest the structure needs work. And use plain names: "Headphones" works better than "Audio accessories, personal".
Categories and attributes work together
Categories narrow the range; attributes let customers refine it. Instead of creating separate categories for "Wireless headphones" and "Wired headphones", one category with a connection-type filter is often easier to maintain. Decide for each category which attributes customers filter by, and make sure every product has them.
The supplier problem
Each supplier has its own category tree. Copying them into your store produces a confusing mix of overlapping categories. Instead:
- design your own structure first;
- map each supplier's categories to it;
- check new supplier categories after each import and map them too.
Taxonomy and search engines
Category pages often bring more search traffic than product pages, because they match broader queries like "running shoes for women". A clear structure with descriptive names and a short introduction on each category page helps both customers and search engines.
Maintaining the structure
Review the taxonomy a few times a year. Merge categories that overlap, split those that have grown too large, and look at search queries on your site: frequent searches for something that has no category are a hint to create one.
How YfiFX helps
YfiFX lets you map each supplier's categories to your own structure, so products from different sources land in the right place in one Master price list. Attributes from supplier files are mapped to your fields, which keeps filters consistent across suppliers. The resulting structure is exported to your store and feeds together with products, prices and stock.
Set it up once. YfiFX does the rest
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