Three Ways To Improve Your Category Navigation

When consumers online shop, they do so with the intention of finding a desired product in a quick, simple and efficient way. Through category pages, visitors are able to improve and narrow down their search to speed up the process and check out faster. E-commerce sites should be able to provide visitors with an optimal experience, and part of that experience is competent category navigation. Here are three easy jollways you can improve your category navigation to ultimately turn browsers into buyers!

1. Promote Certain Products on Category Pages

Sporadically placing products on certain category pages is one approach you could take, however, a better approach would be to promote certain products on category pages. This is especially useful when you want to push certain products such as best sellers, sale items, those with higher margins, and products of excess stock.

For example, Jollyes.com promotes their best selling products at the top of the results for specific category pages.

2. Include Promotional Banners on Category Pages

Including promotional banners relevant to the category page is valuable and informative to consumers. Placing banners is useful for promoting specific campaigns, highlighting sales, or redirecting visitors to other relevant, complimentary pages. Nextopia’s merchandising tool allows one to create promotional banners on the fly, and even allow you to manually place these products in a specific pattern on category pages.

For example, Pink Boutique uses promotional banners to inform consumers that a certain product is back in stock.

3. Allow Shoppers to Filter their Navigation

Category pages act as a tool to narrow down search for visitors, however, they can still be very overwhelming if a category page has endless pages to scroll through. This is where a tool such as filters can help by allowing customers to filter their navigation to more specific results. Some popular filters are price, color, size, brand, and material.

Tip: Make sure you don’t display filters that are not related to a category page. For example, you don’t want to display a shoe size filter on a jacket category page because it’s irrelevant. Rather, use filters such as pattern, style, and length for jackets (see photo above).

Nextopia allows you to control the filtering on each category page based upon taxonomy. Only the associated filters that are related to that category will appear on the page.

With the e-commerce world becoming more saturated every day, it’s important for retailers to make their online sites optimal and stand above their competitors. These tips are some of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the overall shopping experience for consumers.