What makes a good product category page? How can you ensure it’s usable and engaging for your target audience? If you want your conversion rate to increase and your bounce rates to decrease, you need to look at every aspect of your e-commerce website, including product category pages and how well they serve their purpose.
According to Statista, there are approximately 2.14 billion online shoppers. The pandemic forced many people to start buying online to maintain social distancing, creating fast-paced growth in digital retail. As more people realize the ease of ordering from their computers and having goods delivered, they continue to buy from e-commerce stores.
The user experience (UX) for an online shop requires a bit more effort to keep users engaged and ease them through the stages of the buyer’s journey. Here are the best ways to create a stellar product category page focused on the needs of your users.
1. Identify Your Audience
Usability.gov recommends first identifying who will use the products you’re selling, the purpose is and under what conditions. Knowing who you serve is your first step to creating a user-friendly category page.
Think about the reasons your customers seek one of your products. What are the pain points driving them to action? First, create buyer personas, so you fully understand the emotions behind their actions. Dig deep into your analytics and figure out what makes your typical customer tick.
Ashley Furniture breaks its product categories into mattresses, kitchen, kids, outdoor, rugs and storage. Each page features what’s on sale at the top with larger images and a tab explaining why it’s a reasonable price. Note the words of 50% off or the low sale price.
Under the featured items are subcategories of “kids beds,” “kids dressers and chests” and “bunk beds.” Users can easily navigate to the specific thing they need or just grab the specials.
2. Map User Interaction
Take an extra step and map out the interaction users have with your product category pages. What are they most likely to do when they land on each page? What is a secondary thing they might do, such as bouncing to another category? Walk through each possible step of the buyer’s journey and identify any potential pitfalls along the way.
Think through the psychology of why people land on your site in the first place and what their reaction might be to different elements on your page. Are you fully meeting user needs throughout their journey? What might you improve for smartphone users? How can you train new clients without aggravating current ones?
3. Add Filters
Your categories should be pretty broad to allow plenty of products under each one. However, this also creates a situation where your user may not know where to go next. Therefore, you must guide them through the sales funnel. Filters are an excellent way to narrow their search for the perfect product.
Think about the different features within each category and what filters work best to get users from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.
Rvinyl lets users quickly narrow their search by make, model and year. The results show only those products matching the user’s needs. The process is simple and easy to implement, filtering things down and jumping the user through the process much faster than clicking on multiple links.
4. Cut Clutter
As your inventory builds, it’s easy to get so many subcategories and featured items that your page starts to confuse users. If you want to make your product category pages intuitive, you must point the user to only the material they need. Cut anything extra.
Don’t be afraid of white space on your category page. You can always add things back in later. However, if you get many bounces when people land on your page, likely users don’t know what to do next. So add filters, cut images and descriptions and narrow things down.
5. Make Navigational Hierarchy Clear
Think about the process a user goes through when visiting your product category page. Is it clear what their following action is? First, you need to push your user through the sales funnel. You can accomplish this with direct questions, outlining their needs or featuring only a few key pages.
Eva Naturals offers their category page via a mega drop-down menu. Note how they allow you to shop by categories such as serums, moisturizers and scrubs. They also share some additional features not quite as popular and list products by vitamin type.
They feature two products currently on sale to the right, so you can see what your savings might be. Again, it’s clear what you’ll see on each link and which products fit under each subcategory.
6. Pay Attention to Heat Maps
Take the time to study heat maps of your product category page. What links do your site visitors click on most often? Can you move the most popular links to a more prominent position?
Heat maps also indicate selections you could cut from the page to make it less cluttered. Again, think about the user experience and what would make it as streamlined as possible.
Test Your Page
Take the time to test every aspect of your product category page. Make sure all links work on both desktop and mobile devices. Then, click through each element to see where it goes and if it matches user expectations.
Run A/B tests and experiment with different category titles, placement and even text color and size. Get feedback from your users and make improvements until your e-commerce category pages run like a well-oiled machine.
Eleanor is editor of Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
