Bryan Falla from 3dcart's Marketing Team explains why it is impossible to overstate the importance of proper categorization in e-commerce. You may have the greatest widget on the market today, but if customers search your site they can’t find widgets in a way that makes sense to them, or if they run a Google search on widgets and your company isn’t in the first few SERPS rankings (Search Engine Results Pages), no one may ever know.

Simply put by ZOG Digital’s Jason Squardo, "The better the content and site organization, the longer users will want to spend on a site.” Time spent is quantitative metric which allows you to know how long a consumer is on your site. Of course, you want customers to stay on your page as long as possible, and click lots of links, but that is often easier said than done.

Stumbleupon V.P., David Marks, puts it this way, “Whether your business will want to increase or decrease time spent, knowing what your site's actual time spent metrics are is half the battle.” According to one 2012 study, users are spending 27 less seconds per website, but are spending $0.43 more for their time.

If a consumer cannot locate what they want from your webpage within 8 seconds, you will lose them. If your taxonomy is lacking, your SEO hierarchy will fail to put your firm at the head of SERPS rankings, and your products and services will be lost in the weeds on Google.

3dcart wants to make sure you drive the highest SERPS rankings, and then make the most of each customer’s time on your site, so we’ve created the above tutorial to walk you through the basics of proper product categorization.

The first step is to decide on your main topic or brand identity. That will become your umbrella category, under which all other categories, sub-categories, and products fall.  Pretend you’re the customer and ask yourself “Do I care about this? Should I care about this?” And “What’s the quality of the content?”

Use Google’s Taxonomy list as a guideline for ideas on how to find the best categories and sub-categories to apply to your products, creating data silos. A data or information silo in this context is simply an internal information management system that can reciprocate in operation with other related systems (cross-referencing).

A good example of taxonomy is Main Identity/Umbrella Topic> Categories> Sub-categories> Product

3dcart’s platform allows you to cross-reference products in multiple categories. This is very important! Customers are not homogenous; their brains process information differently. The way one customer enters and uses your site may be the opposite of another. Cross-referencing your products in multiple categories and sub-categories maximizes the potential for all customers to find what they’re searching for when they visit.

More information on categorization and Google taxonomy can be found here, and you can always call on us at 3dcart for all your e-commerce solutions.