Background

The ecommerce site with which we had partnered sold one primary product category: firearms. The vast majority of their sales were in this category. Many of their customers (and even their employees) had no idea the actual breadth of products they carried. Most of their additional products were relegated to an 'accessory' category and effectively hidden from view. They were only findable via on-site search, not through navigation.

Goals

1. Expansion: the primary goal of a redesign of the Nav Tree is to better highlight the breadth of products that the site already sells.

2. Connection: with adjustment to the product categories comes the opportunity to better target the important connections between products and the findability of products both on- and off-site via SEO improvements.

3. Flexibility: as the product catalog grows, the nav tree will adjust to match.

With a full product review, the 4 primary product categories were expanded into 12. Thousands of products were 'found' during our review. An audit was run on the product titles for SEO analysis and they were grouped into the clearest subcategories. Even up to the last day of the 2 month project, additional product types were being found and grouped.

Limitations

There were two primary limitations to the systems that were in place:

1. Depth: we were only able to expand to 4 levels deep in any particular branch of the tree. Luckily a navigation tree of 4 levels is generally deep enough for consumer-facing goods.
2. Exclusivity: a product could only fall within 1 'node' of the tree. Multiple assignments were not possible, no matter how logical. For instance, something could be both a "Hunting Knife" and a "Folding Knife", but we were not able to assign it to both. Decisions had to be made.

As a site merchandiser, I want to give customers a way to find more than just our primary product category because increasing Units per Transaction can be the difference for meeting profitability goals

Conclusion

Although there were thousands of products to categorize, we were able to find homes for all of them across a relatively shallow top level. We also found, through competitive analysis, several opportunties for expanding the products to be carried.