Are your category pages holding you back?
Mega menus aren't enough: you need a Category Drilldown
Summary
Problem: A wall of products on your category pages will confuse your customers if the differences are not readily visible. This is often overlooked because most mega menus have this built-in—but search engines and mobile are less helpful.
Solution: Break your categories into smaller pieces with a digestible number of products.
Examples:
Inspiration
Synopsis
Sheena Iyengar gave a TED Talk about her findings about how humans interact with choices. Her first study was in a supermarket with hundreds of choices of jam. She set up a display to allow customers to try a jam, to sell more jars (Costco style). She varied the number of available choices.
- 24 jams: 60% of people stopped but 3% bought a jar of jam.
- 6 jams: 40% of people stopped but 30% bought a jar of jam.
The result: the display with six jars of jam had 6x the conversion rate.
“Tell me how these choices are different from one another. If your employees can’t tell the difference, neither can your customers.” — Sheena Iyengar
Application
Customers don’t like too many options. Instead, break apart these categories into smaller groups, leveraging each page as a target for search engines with quality content and images.
I call this the “Category Drilldown”.
Think of your categories (collections) as a hierarchal tree. You should have 2-3 levels deep. These collections still show products but should have a list of “child” collections to narrow the focus. This list should be highly graphical with textual explanations, making their search highly concrete.
But I use my navigation menus for this. This wouldn’t apply, right?
Navigation menus force decisions early in the process. This works with a small catalog but begins to break down with more product variety or quantity.
Navigation menus mean a flat site hierarchy. Customers lose the relationship between collections.
Navigation menus don’t track history. If your customer wants to navigate to a different level, they can’t click back, which is the intuitive action.
Should I simplify my navigation menu to use more Category Drilldown?
I recommend a hybrid approach: the navigation menus should be simple, giving the customer a tactical entry point into the category.
Should I still show products on the parent Category Drilldown pages?
Yes! Make sure the “child” collections are most quickly visible.
