Creating a streamlined user experience that allows your customers to easily find what they’re looking for (or better, what they don’t yet know they’re looking for) will boost conversion rates and basket value.

Yes, the user experience should be personalised to the individual user, and yes, it should offer the right mix of content and commerce to drive more visitors down the funnel to purchase. However, the basic structure of your product set-up will impact your ability to effectively merchandise products across your site.

Products often have variants – size and colour being the most obvious, particularly in fashion. It makes sense for variants to be grouped together in a logical manner so that users can browse your site without having to trawl through endless pages of similar products. 

But you need to weigh up your desired end-to-end user experience, alongside platform capabilities and your appetite for custom development. Only then will you be in a position to decide on the right product structure for your business.

Here are a few considerations for when it comes to defining your product setup…

HOW BEST TO DISPLAY YOUR PRODUCT ASSORTMENT?

You should populate your category pages with distinct products. While it may make sense for your business to configure colour and size as variants of an individual product, you may want to showcase all the colourways as distinct products on a category page, but not size. 

Gymshark’s Block Long Sleeve T-Shirt is available with colour, size and fit attributes. However, only size is set as a variant – enabling Gymshark to display all colours and all fits as separate products on the category page. It’s worth noting that all attributes are leveraged to filter products regardless of whether configured as a variant or not.

If your product range is large enough that grouping colour variants together on your category pages offers a more efficient user experience, you should map out all the actions a user could take and the expected outcome. This will help you understand whether there is a gap between your requirements and platform functionality – and more importantly what it will take to plug that gap.

Uniqlo group together size and colour in a single product on its category page. Users can filter by colour to only display the selected colour variants. They can also select a colour variant and click on the image to navigate to the product page (displaying the selected colour variant).  It’s also possible to select a colour and size variant from the category page and add directly to their bag.

PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES AS COMMERCIAL TRADING CATEGORIES.

Consider whether you want to create merchandisable category pages (complete with heading, description and SEO-optimised metadata) based on a product’s attribute. It’s unlikely you'll be able to set an attribute as a variant and create a category page for it without investing in a 3rd party app or custom development.

Craster helps luxury hospitality brands furnish new and existing spaces. Customers are often looking for a specific ‘look’ - thus making the finish of a product an important and searchable attribute. While finish could be considered a product variant, it’s also a commercial category in its own right, and needed to be presented as such.

WHAT ABOUT THE PRODUCT PAGE?

Although you may choose to display all colourways of a single product separately on a category page, you'll want your users to intuitively discover different colour options for any given style without leaving the page. 

Similar to Gymshark, Pangaia only configure size as a product variant in order to display all colour options as distinct products on the category page.  Relevant colour swatches are aggregated on a product page using customisation.

DON'T FORGET ABOUT THE WISHLIST.

While the wishlist may not be considered a core part of the ecommerce user journey, it often plays a part in driving incremental sales - if set up correctly! Products added to a wishlist (and subsequently to the cart) from either the category page or product page must take in to account the product set-up and offer appropriate actions to the user.

Everlane display colour swatches for products on the category page, allow users to select their preferred colour and add to the wishlist directly from the category page. The experience is seamless and enhances the user experience.

However you decide to configure your products, thinking ahead to your desired UX and your appetite for customisation vs. simply leveraging out-the-box functionality will certainly reduce the risk of nasty, unexpected surprises once development is under way.

For support in defining and building the optimum setup for your product assortment, please feel free to get in touch.