Bucket-O-Data: Categorize & Subcategorize Product Catalog Before Sending to CSEs

In digesting different marketing ideas to help etailers better use comparison shopping engines (“CSEs”) I recently came across an interesting marketing strategy from a client that might help you better market your products into CSEs.

This client has an online mall that markets approximately 40 different categories and subcategories of his product catalog.  He does this because he is trying to have each specific category contain the best marketing language and keywords associated with product descriptions to then appeal to a different “type” of shopper that comes to CSEs to find his product.

In order to create these “unique” categories, he manipulates the product catalog data in different ways to ensure that all of these “categories” are displayed accurately on each CSE respectively.  So he does not have to worry about each category that he creates in his master data base, matching various technical formats required by each CSE, he uses the Channel Management application from MerchantAdvantage.  This way he only has to worry about marketing his new categories not IT headaches mapping those categories to match each CSE taxonomy specifications.

So this client essentially breaks down his own site into categories first before sending data to CSEs or other marketing channels. Another way to look at categories is to see them as buckets of related products with general names associated with them.  Each bucket of products can then be marketed in its own way to a CSE and tracked accordingly. And nothing is more empowering than control, manageability, and tracking product catalogs and marketing.

Far too often etailers simply put up all of their products on their storefront site without considering important marketing language and keywords associated with each product and then defining categories and subcategories to make it easier for a shopper to find the right product. The importance of proper marketing language/keywords and creating categories for products on your site is that it is then much easier for the CSE to market your product catalog PROPERLY and EFFECTIVLY.  Having worked with hundreds of etailers, non-optimized, product catalog data is detrimental to good channel management marketing campaigns and it also makes it harder for search engines to properly identify your site through organic search on their search engine.

So, don’t let this happen to you. May I suggest that “The Homework of the Day” be to break out your whiteboards and starting thinking and planning strategically. 

First: take your whole product line, and break it up. Categorize your data into “categories/buckets”, as the client did above.   

As an example, take a “theoretical” electronics megastore e-seller. They sell 65,000+ products. Management nightmare, right? Not with buckets. This etailer might break down their product catalog let’s say into 10 main categories.

Second: Break down each of these categories into 10 “subcategories”

Third: Granularity (get familiar with that word) is EXCELLENT when optimizing your site catalog information.  The more you define each product and then put them into other categories, maybe even 10 more sub-sub categories, the more options you have to get your products listed across the various categories defined by the CSE and the greater likelihood that organic search engines will find you.

To get a handle on all of this, start by drawing the 10 main categories on your whiteboard.  Let’s say it looks something like this:

1. Computer hardware
2. Electronics
3. PCs
4. Mac
5. Notebooks
6. Software
7. Networking
8. Audio
9. Video
10. Music

Now take each of these categories and define sub categories.  For example, under Software, you might have the following subcategories:

1. Business
2. Home
3. Enterprise…
4. etc….

You get the point. There is no exact science and this all can take some time but it is worth it. You are now optimizing your data in ways that ensures that your products get listed in the various categories and subcategories that exist on the CSE.  It would be a shame to have your PC’s listed in the “PCs” category and then not come up when someone looks in the “Notebooks” category.  You can solve this by mapping your products and by defining them with a deeper granularity into sub categories.

Many third party companies can do this for you, and do an excellent job of it, but can you afford it, and is it really that complicated? Use a tool based product that helps you manage all of this for you and watch your CSEs start performing better than they ever have before.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. CSEs can help you increase sales but not if you don't understand their logic and how they market products.

2. Creating better onsite taxonomy (subcategories of global categories) of your product catalog makes it much easier to market that catalog data to CSEs.

3. Ensure your products are listed in all avaliable areas that a CSE might display your product by using subcategories. 

4. This level of marketing is advanced, but get used to it and learn it = once you get up to speed online hits from marketing channels to your storefront should increase.