Dynamic Categories

Are your Categories good enough?

We all know that Categories are how you organise your products – they’re how customers find them, and how Google organises them. They’re pretty central to all forms of eCommerce, and always have been.

As with anything, categories come with their own challenges. At a top level, you need to decide how you want to organise your products; category hierarchy is an essential part of building your product content.

• By type or by brand?

• By size or by colour?

• By purpose or by collection?

However, like anything, categorising your products takes time, and if you want to do anything more complex, it takes a lot of time.

Why do we need better categorisation?

In everything eCommerce, the customer journey is paramount. With careful A/B testing, companies can work out their ‘perfect’ hierarchy, but even in an ideal world, that will only be a ‘best fit’.

Every customer will have their own preferences for how they interact with a website; do they use the search bar first, or go straight to categories; do they look for a brand, or for what’s on sale?

What you’re looking to do is to give them the best possible set of choices, without making product management impossible.

If you could quickly and easily provide more granular categorisation, visitors to your site will be able to find products much quicker and easier – when we are talking about eCommerce conversions, speed is key.

The problem is that the categorisation tools on most platforms simply won’t give you what you need.

Dynamic Categories could be the answer

Dynamic Categorisation works on the idea of rule based automation. For example, you can take products which already sit in a ‘Sofa’ category, and add a rule for products which are both ‘on sale’ and are from the brand ‘Stressless’. Those products would still sit in their original category, but the rule would add them to a new Dynamic Category:   

Sale Products > Sofas > Stressless

This lets you have far more control over the organisation of your website, with a lot less of the work.