Why Should We Care About Taxonomy?

Taxonomy, or product classification, is the basis of online navigation, attribute normalization, and meaningful analytics and reporting. Taxonomy is the ultimate expression of a distributor's ability to keep their products organized and is often the most over-looked data element in the ecommerce experience.

Signs Your Taxonomy Might Not Be Optimal:

• Leveraging a third-party data structure that is too broad in some places and too narrow in others.
• Product attributes are not normalized at the terminal taxonomy node (the lowest level of classification).
• Print catalog index repurposed as web taxonomy.
• Taxonomy nodes are not intuitive or are redundant.

Best Practices:

• Dedicate resources to maintaining a custom taxonomy based on the unique product breadth and depth.
• Leverage taxonomy as a basis for detailed financial reporting and analytics. For example, a more granular taxonomy can allow an organization to report sales trends of wrenches by type (e.g. "combination wrenches," "box end wrenches," "adjustable wrenches," etc.), rather than being limited to reporting and analyzing "Wrenches." Increased sales of specific types of wrenches could indicate trends within specific customer segments.
• Optimize taxonomy for meaningful online navigation. In tandem with keyword search, taxonomy allows customers to quickly navigate to and isolate relevant products.
• Route frequent search terms directly to relevant nodes of taxonomy to ensure search result relevancy.
• Use terminal taxonomy nodes as the basis for defining and normalizing product attributes.

Eli Cooley

Solutions Architect