How Mobius helped this American based retailer transition their existing taxonomy

The Business Need

An American based mid-range department chain of stores wanted to validate and transition their existing online taxonomy. They wanted facets that are compliant with industry/competitor standards, seasonality factors and that provide better user engagement.

The project requirement was as follows:

  • Effective search to sale ratio: to help users find the intended product intuitively in lesser time
  • Search and user-friendly navigation: improve shopping experience with the help of well-defined schema
  • Ensuring every category & sub-category had the necessary coverage and scope, to add new appropriate products as identified
  • Use of international standardized naming convention
  • Poly Hierarchy - Locate categories in multiple Departments for cross merchandising

Challenges we faced

The internal cross-functional teams of the client (digital marketing, user experience and merchandising, ) had different views for taxonomy structure creation. There was misclassification within the categories that made identification of product types difficult.

Distinguishing between a sub-category and a facet and sorting of sub-categories in a logical or alphabetical order was quite challenging. Also, understanding the colloquial and international terminologies required additional efforts.

How we solved the problem

  • We began by performing an in-depth competitor analysis and compared to find out how they’re positioning themselves
  • We then began to craft the taxonomy with this information and ensured that it is in reference to the GS1 standards and adheres to universal standard naming labels.
  • We then review the internal site search terms and perform impact analysis to suggest top performing terms. We analyzed the top performing keywords and gathered inputs from google adwords to arrive at taxonomy based on user preferences
  • Ensured every category/sub-category had the necessary scope, to add new ones as identified. We also provided a common language for category and facet management, thus speeding up reaction to consumer needs and increase the consumer experience

Results

  • Improve the buying experience
  • Support buying programs by allowing buyers to pre-select groups of applicable products
  • Provide a common language for category management, thus speeding up reaction to consumer needs
  • Speed up the search benefits
    • Integrated with search engine for a combination of category browsing and searching
    • Better faceted navigation for buyers
    • Increase number of web pages with meta tags
  • Data
    • Eliminates redundant activities and improves data quality
    • Integrity and accuracy of product set-up, maintenance, and catalogs
    • Cross-reference to existing proprietary trading partner classification systems
    • Introduced close to 300 new sub-categories across different meta-categories which helped their customers enjoy a better navigational experience in finding their desired product

Increase in category sales rate

Increase in category traffic Rate

Enabled potential usage of Point Of Sale (POS) data consolidation

Looking out for a similar solution?

We use cookies in this website to personalize the content we deliver, improve your overall website experience, and to analyze our traffic. On clicking “Okay” you agree to the terms specified with respect to cookies in our Privacy Policy but you can also opt-out at any time.