Specific product pages are a crucial aspect of e-commerce growth. Yet category pages can be almost as efficient – if they are used in the right way.
Well crafted, the Ecommerce category page is more than just a stilted list of products that come under the same umbrella. It is a portal that takes a wide variety of customer desires and connects it to conversion with optimum performance.
All you need to do is put some effort into form, architecture, and construction.
Leading e-Commerce Category Pages Vs Product Pages
Before we look deeper into this, we should look at what the category page means – how it differs from the product page, and why it’s worth using.
A category page lists all products to fit into a specific category, allowing shoppers to review many of the relevant options very quickly.
For example, if you were selling kitchen appliances, you could have a category page for each of the following types of items:
- The refrigerators
- Freezers
- Toasters
- Microwave
- Blenders
A specific product page makes it the perfect destination for shoppers to know exactly whatever they want, or to push anybody towards that specific product.
But if someone just knows that they want to have a general toaster, sending them to one, in particular, may have a backfire: it might not be right for them.
Drag them to a well-crafted toaster category website, and they will find one that fits their particular needs, making them far more likely to eventually convert.
Much like this on Walmart:
Notice that the monitoring of landing pages and consumer experiences is important for the use of category pages. Full sales can often take place on individual product sites, so you need to know which website customers are coming from.
If you note that visitors to your product pages are more likely to switch after they have viewed your category sites, you’ll know they’re supporting you.
So what are the easiest ways to get the eCommerce sites to work? Let’s walk over seven primary topics.
Enables Complex and Intuitive Filtration
It will take time to move from a large range to a single piece. Maybe a shopper doesn’t know exactly what they want, or how to find it.
Is staying on your group page bad for them? It hinges on the situation.
Whether they just care about what’s on sale so it’s a positive idea. Although if they’re really frustrated (as is more likely), then you’re definitely not going to sell out.
This will help to allow intelligently crafted filtering of items. That means you help people pick and sort items easily through stuff like:
- Price.
- Customer rating average.
- Stuff.
- Level stock.
- Compatibility with Commodity.
- Special features.
The shopper should be in a position to pick several choices at once. The more they can, the more likely they will believe they are matched to the specified goods.
Presentation is essential to that. In addition to being prominently placed (and supported as an overlay for mobile use), the filter must have a simple look with zero uncertainty when selecting or deleting options
And bring your ideas into the file, just as you would with menu items: getting a filter choice that shoppers don’t understand would just waste time.
Make Support Readily Available
As noted in the previous chapter, shoppers don’t always know what they want and it won’t always be solved by searching through filters.
Have actual support helpers ready to answer shopper questions via live chat during normal hours. They will recommend individual products, answer large questions in the categories, and generally help out.
To reduce the bill, you should hire virtual assistants from places across the world that have lower housing costs and lower wage scales.
Operating via a live chat unifying device, they will follow the same norm whatever their situations might be.
A perfect example of that is the Argo mall bot with its Site Search functionality.
Customers can call for a bot for a particular product (such as “Samsung Galaxy Tab S6”) or a product category (“black laptop”) and Messenger can return related results:
When people are busy addressing difficult problems with a Chabot in order to answer questions, you will guarantee that there is still some help at hand.
Offer Meaningful Content (Such as FAQs)
Some sellers think it is worth a visit to easily spruce up the aesthetics of a category website. It really isn’t.
A group page should be a website with content and intent in its own right. The page should be followed by a fair introduction that ‘sells the definition’ of the entire genre.
You can deliver content created to be useful to specific searchers, either below the commodity grid or on different pages (internal link is good if you link back).
Through your site’s wide-ranging analytics and social media and search engine information ( e.g. auto-completed keywords), you can glean up which questions people ask about a category.
Formulate and give succinct reactions in digestible pieces. This will demonstrate your expertise and will help the page rank well.
Prominently Feature Breadcrumb Links
A customer can get slightly lost while navigating a large e-commerce site. When there is consistent product tagging, it is less likely to happen but it is still possible. The possibility of going back and forth between types of products and selected filters is disorienting.
Yes, there’s always the choice to just return to the initial page, but that’s a loss of progress.
What is it that you just click the ‘Back’ button?
It depends on the filter’s design, and it’s intensely frustrating to click ‘Back’ after digging through eight filters and find out too late that none of the filters counted as a new page.
Because of this, it is better to have clear breadcrumb links that allow shoppers to easily revisit past category pages (and figure out where they might need to go next).
Breadcrumb links particularly if marked appropriately by structured data are also useful for SEO, as they make the context of the web easier for a searching crawler. And because SEO leads to more trips, this would eventually lead to more chances of conversion.
Ensure the Accuracy of the Images and Text
It is important that you maintain a decent degree of quality in your presentation as you show a vast variety of items on a category list.
You have the most urgent graphics. The first thing a tourist sees might be an unsorted list of objects and if the photos are different shapes, types, or aspect ratios then the business would look messy.
Therefore, you need to invest in the photography of the product. You don’t need the backgrounds of all images of your items to be the same, but they need to be stylistically similar: for example, simple backdrops with bright overlays.
Should the picture have equal proportions and the same polish amount? If you like, you can use overlaid icons to convey the form of an object.
The terminology is usually more difficult. If you have very few, it would be difficult for the guests to select the correct choices. If you have so many, it will harm the look and reduce the degree of visibility overall.
Stick to the basics: items like price, weight, scale, brand, current stock level and planned stock level (the more you can forecast this).
You may also add short comments such as “Making a nice present” or “Great for parties” (then build to the full pages of the products).
Optimize Scaling of Display-Based Grid
For any sort of page on an e-commerce platform, responsiveness is a central consideration. But, for a category list, it is much more important. That is because of the scale and reach of an unfiltered product collection.
On a given list, you might have 100 objects. They may not look so detailed on a mobile computer, even though they appear beautifully on a laptop screen.
Grid systems can (and sometimes do) scale incredibly smoothly. It is mainly a matter of fine-tuning the device breakpoints and the changes to them.
You will also find grid models and systems that will do much of the job for you, resulting in sleek product configurations that reshape smoothly to fit their setting.
Allow User Layout Customization
For any successful eCommerce vendor, consumer satisfaction is a primary target, because it pays off in a big way. They will confide more in the ads. Be far less likely to hesitate until you place an order. Will be far more likely to refer future clients.
Related key factors in winning consumer satisfaction, such as:
- Growing promotions.
- Early launches of the products.
- Excellent support.
- Individualized correspondence.
However, the availability of customization tools on eCommerce product pages is something that is frequently underestimated.
You will protect a key reason for them to keep coming back if you allow logged-in users to have personalized templates. Take,
For example, One consumer may like to save a certain collection of filters so they can use it on future visits again. Moreover, there’s nothing technically difficult about this: just have a shortcut bar that can be toggled and changed in user settings. Alternatively, the customization can be performed on behalf of the customer.
This would be better for you but more time-consuming (if you’re dealing for, say, a high-value B2B e-commerce client, it’s certainly worth it).
Final Thoughts
Although you definitely need to spend a lot of time designing your key product pages, you shouldn’t ignore the sites in the e-commerce area.
They act as critical routers: collecting and gradually shifting traffic from search engines and advertising toward conversion. A poor category page has the potential to disrupt the whole market funnels for many goods. Usefully, there are different attempts you can make to boost your sites in the eCommerce sector, and we’ve mentioned the most important here.
Follow as many of these recommendations as you can lead to product pages of high quality, and retain consistency, and you will see good results.
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