A correctly designed product attribute schema can increase the findability of products; improve search performance; enable cross-selling and up-selling; enhance the capability of offering solution bundles, and ultimately improve conversions and increase sales. Correct attribute design is a sophisticated process and requires expertise in a range of areas including merchandising, user experience, product information management, e-commerce, taxonomy development, and information architecture.
One of the critical elements for product attribute schema design is a deep understanding of users based on their role and their objectives. This understanding can be developed by creating personas and user journey maps. An output of this process is a series of use cases that describe exactly what the user needs to do when they are visiting a site and solving a problem.
While the principles are the same across industries, the journey of the consumers may vary. This calls for a different approach to the creation of personas and user journey maps for each industry. For example, B2B industrial manufacturers will require more input from domain experts when developing product schema. For, they will know more about how the product is used and how customers make decisions and solve problems. B2C businesses, in contrast, will require an understanding of the customer’s personal preferences and buying behaviors, rather than requiring deep technical expert input.
Irrespective of the participants involved in defining the buyer personas or user journey maps, the overarching intent is to identify the user’s “mental model” and reflect it in the design of attributes. The goal is to offer the user with the correct choices at each touchpoint. The correct choices can be offered to the user through refiners or facets on the left-hand navigation, related products or through solution bundles.
This is where product display taxonomies can play a role as they are closely related to attribute schemas. They offer insights on how to manage and optimize the attributes by leveraging the attribute schema for faceted search and guided navigation. Consider the elements that one would click on to narrow a selection of products – size, brand, price, color – or in the case of technical product – the engineering specifications, tolerances and configuration options. These elements populate the refiners that customers use to locate exactly what they want. In this way, taxonomy design is closely related to product attribute design.
In short, fixing product attributes and product taxonomies leads to directly measurable uplift in click-throughs, conversions, and sales. In addition, product attributes and product taxonomies aid in findability, cross-sell and up-sell. To simplify, product attributes and the taxonomy that organizes products on a B2B or B2C website determine whether the products are visible and findable. Hence, every organization selling products and using a web presence can benefit from a well-tuned and tested product attribute schema.
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