The Business Need
An American based mid-range department chain of stores wanted to validate and transition their existing online taxonomy. They wanted facets that are compliant with industry/competitor standards, seasonality factors and that provide better user engagement.
The project requirement was as follows:
- Effective search to sale ratio: to help users find the intended product intuitively in lesser time
- Search and user-friendly navigation: improve shopping experience with the help of well-defined schema
- Ensuring every category & sub-category had the necessary coverage and scope, to add new appropriate products as identified
- Use of international standardized naming convention
- Poly Hierarchy - Locate categories in multiple Departments for cross merchandising
Challenges we faced
The internal cross-functional teams of the client (digital marketing, user experience and merchandising, ) had different views for taxonomy structure creation. There was misclassification within the categories that made identification of product types difficult.
Distinguishing between a sub-category and a facet and sorting of sub-categories in a logical or alphabetical order was quite challenging. Also, understanding the colloquial and international terminologies required additional efforts.