2 tips to improve site navigation

Site navigation allows customers to refine the initial search result using a selection of attributes that correspond to what they are looking for. Because these attributes determine whether or not customers will be able to find your products, it is very important to pay attention to managing attributes correctly. Here are 2 tips to improve site navigation.

No matter how great a product is, no one will buy it if they cannot find it anywhere. That is the reason site navigation, or faceted search, is now the basic standard for every website that presents users with large sets of information, specifically ecommerce websites. 

Site navigation accompanies searches, and enables customers to apply different filters that help them slice through thousands of results and locate the item they are looking for. Conversely, site navigation also helps customers that are just browsing the store to focus on things that might interest them. 

Site navigation allows customers to refine the initial search result using a selection of attributes that correspond to what they are looking for. Because these attributes determine whether or not customers will be able to find your products, it is very important to pay attention to managing attributes correctly. After all, this can make or break the shopping experience. 

Here are two tips on how to improve your site navigation:

• Attribute selection

The first tip is to put some thought into which attribute you offer to customers. The higher branches of the taxonomy tree, those that contain wide categories, should contain universal attributes, such as price range or user reviews. Going down the tree, sub categories and lower levels should contain more specific attributes that are relevant to the items displayed in the branch, such as material, or model.   

It is also important not to overwhelm the customers by offering them all the attributes you have in the store. The need to scroll down and go over each attribute in order to find the relevant ones might cause the customers to be frustrated and leave your store. Instead, sellers should research and find what their customers’ priorities are, and make sure to present only the most relevant attributes for each sub category. 

When selecting which attributes to offer, it is also recommended to avoid using attributes with only one value, and aim for 3-5 values for each attribute. 
 

• Clean Data

Once sellers decide on which attributes to use, the next step is to make sure that the data they contain is clean. Spelling errors, duplications, redundancies and other errors should be corrected, otherwise they will hurt performances. Our goal is to make the data in the attributes clean and efficient. 

For example, if a store that sells clothes uses the “material” attribute, but offers similar values such as “Cotton”, “100% Cotton” and “Pure Cotton”, then it is probable that cotton items are divided between these three values, instead of all appearing together. Such redundancy is also frustrating to customers, who are forced to select each one of the values separately.  

In order to make sure that data is up to par, it is recommended to create a format guide that will detail how values are to be selected and then put into the website (spelling convention, capitalization, spacing etc.). This will ensure all the values are uniform across the store. 

The role of attributes is not over once the customer goes into the product page. Rather than using them for in-site navigation, attributes are used in product pages to provide the customers with more information, allowing them to compare products. For this to work properly, all the products in the same category should include a list of the product’s attributes in the product page. The style of the list and its location in the page should be uniform across the category, to make sure comparisons are simple and easy. This is another place where a form guide may help.   

Findability is key to ecommerce success, and a lot of it depends on the store’s attribute navigation infrastructure. To help customers find your product more easily, it is important to keep the attributes:

• Clean
• Complete
• Relevant 

Making sure the attributes you offer in your store are clean, complete and relevant will increase product findability, improve the shopping experience and give a boost to sales.