Category Page: The One That Makes Product Search Easy

For a long time now, I’ve been a part of a lot of conversations related to the category page for e-commerce websites. The one most important question that has been bothering many e-commerce business owners is whether their website should have a category page or not. Many, if not all, e-commerce companies have this question lingering in their minds. This is a justifiable dilemma because it will add another step to the users' journey at times and no business owner would want the user to traverse unnecessary steps on their website, thereby leading to not that good an experience. For this very reason, a lot of owners scrap off the category page from their website. This may be a good move for a website that does not offer a wide array of products but for a company that offers more than 1,000 products with an average of 50 products per category, having a category page becomes a necessary as well as an experience-enhancing move. 

Remember - every "mistake" a user makes is not because they're stupid, but because your website sucks.― Peep Laja, Master The Essentials of Conversion Optimization: Experts' Approach to Optimization

Even while you are reading this piece, you will have questions cropping up about the need for this page but there is a reason for everything. Today I will give you not one, not two, but four reasons which necessitate having a category page on your e-commerce website if you have a wide array of products.

Image Source: https://blog.contactpigeon.com/

People have choices. Category page helps them narrow it down

The Paradox of Choices is a great book in which American psychologist Barry Schwartz talks about how eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. This elimination of choices can only be done with the help of a category page. Just think about a scenario where a user just landed on a fashion e-commerce website planning to buy a hat. Now when the user comes on to the website, when the category page is absent, there’ll be a lot of products that the user would have to skim through before actually reaching the hats. All this while when the user was skimming through, he encountered a lot of other products and by the time the first hat came, the user had already lost interest in the hat. He/she might now be more interested in some other product, but since the intent was not that huge for buying the 'distracting product', the user would easily exit the website. If there would have been a category page, the user would have straight away gone to the category page, chosen the relevant section, and then moved up in the funnel to finally turn out as a buyer. 

Image Source: https://www.ashdale-consulting.com/

Category pages basically list all the products in specific categories which makes it easier for the visitors to find the product. If there would not be a category page, then the user would have to just browse through the whole website to choose the product that he/she wishes to buy. The probability of the user exiting from the website is even higher while they browse because most of the users look for a hassle-free experience and not finding the product one wishes to buy is not an experience that people would be looking for. The idea behind having the category page is to narrow down the user selection and make certain products stand out which will make users find their choice of product easily.

Would you rather be inclined towards showing products randomly or in an organized manner?

Image Source: https://www.mailmunch.com/

Category pages help you to sort the products in a way that makes sense for the users/visitors and makes their search as well as journey easier. Consider a scenario in which there is no category page on the website. When a user comes on to the website, on the home page, there’ll be some products that would be shown. Now apart from that, on the next page, all the products are being shown. The user might get a bit too overwhelmed and might just exit from the website since he/she wouldn’t be able to find the product that they were looking for. What might be a good option here is keeping a category page where there are filters and sort options. In most website category page layout, you would easily find a filer on the left side and the sort option in the upper right corner. Since people are used to this kind of layout, opting for these things would make the users journey easy and make people convert easily and better. Wondering what sort options to put? You can begin with the most common ones:

• Sort By Best Seller
• Sort By Cost
• Low to High
• High to Low
• Sort by Name

Want to see which sort option should be the default one? A/B test it and you’ll have your answer. 

People want to find what they are looking for fast and quick:

With the category page, you’ll be able to make sure that the user finds the right product; the one that he/she is looking for. More often than not a lot of users fail to find the product that they are looking for. With a category page, their search becomes easier and refined. A happy visitor is one who gets to the desired product in the fastest, most efficient, and hassle-free way. The easier it is to navigate on the website, the happier the prospect would be and the happier the person is, the better the probability of him/her converting into a buyer. The aim as a business owner should be to make the user search experience fast, feasible, and easy. 

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon

Wondering what are the kind of A/B tests that you can run on this page? Well, each and every page on a website has a lot of potential and the number of a/b tests that you can run are endless. You can do a filter position a/b testing. As mentioned earlier, most of the websites have it on the left side while some even have it at the top. For your website, you can actually run a test and get a better understanding. You can also test the sort option position, the number of products that are being shown, the product card, and the information that it contains, the product images, etc. The most important among all the tests you would do would be the one in which you check how many products to show in a row. Wondering why? Well, the more the number of products in a row, the smaller the product images would be visible. Make sure that you keep 3-4 products in a single row so that product images are shown very well to the visitors and they don’t have to waste time going to a product that they won’t buy. 

To conclude, category pages are of vital importance, and businesses, especially with large numbers of products, should surely have it. It’s sure to make the journey of the user hasslefree which increases the probability of the user converting thereby increasing revenue.

To understand things better, feel free to reach out to me. You can also subscribe to CXL’s content to have an in-depth understanding of things related to the category page.