For a long time, Jet.com, the American e-commerce company, used back-end (product type) taxonomy. However, when analytics revealed their customers have different intents or missions when shopping for different things, they decided to develop a site-taxonomy (front-end taxonomy). This article by Nikita Sharma, a senior software engineer at Jet, explores how front-end taxonomy came to be at Jet.
Product organization optimized in a way that allows shoppers to find what they are looking for seamlessly can make a huge difference. Product organization can minimize the time, effort spent shopping, and it improves the customer experience. This, in turn, increases the number of sales for the business. However, building a mission-or intent-based shopping experience becomes difficult when dealing with back-end taxonomy where each product belongs to exactly one node of the shopper-facing tree. To overcome this challenge, Jet decided to build a site-taxonomy (front-end taxonomy).
To begin with, Jet decided to leverage and reuse existing UI tools developed for managing customer-facing taxonomy on Walmart.com as their retail teams worked across both Walmart and Jet. This would also ensure that a business user would have a centralized tool for managing shopper-facing taxonomies on both Walmart.com and Jet.com. Furthermore, Jet wanted to empower its retail team to create flexible views of the product catalog. This would help the retail team merchandise product categories on the site easily. These were the key drivers that led Jet to develop a front-end taxonomy.
A complete front-end taxonomy framework with tooling was implemented earlier this year, and Jet.com transitioned to a front-end taxonomy for site navigation in mid-May. The front-end taxonomy is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where each node represents rules for catalog search. The edges of this DAG signify the parent-child relationship between nodes. Every edge is directed from the parent to the child. In addition, barring a few exceptions, a node can have an unlimited number of parents or children.
Currently, instead of storing what front-end taxonomy nodes a product belongs to at the product level, each front-end taxonomy node has rules based on product attributes. These attributes are used in real-time by the search to evaluate relevant products to display to the customer.
Click here to read the original article.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
