Categories and taxonomy: how to organize a catalog of thousands of products

What a taxonomy is for

A taxonomy is the catalog's category tree: Tools › Power tools › Drills. It serves three audiences at once:

• Buyers, who navigate from general to specific until they reach what they want.
• Search engines, which use the site structure and its internal links to understand what each page is about. Google dedicates a page of its documentation for online stores to it.
• Your team, which uses the category to know what data each product needs.

A poorly designed taxonomy shows everywhere: categories with hundreds of products in no order, products nobody finds and records that ask for data that does not apply.

Designing the tree: how buyers search

The most common mistake is copying the internal organization: the warehouse aisle, the purchasing department or the supplier's brand. Buyers don't think that way. To design the tree:

1. Start with what you sell, not what you would like to sell: group the products you have today.
2. Name things the way buyers talk. “Drills”, not “Electric rotary tools”.
3. Look for balance. One final category with three products and another with eight hundred is a sign that the tree is uneven.
4. Separate filters from categories. “Cordless drills” is often better as a filter (power source) inside “Drills” than as a separate category.

Categories and filters work together

The category says what the product is; attributes say what it is like. In a store, the category defines the listing and the attributes feed that listing's filters: power, voltage, brand, price. That combination is faceted search, and it depends on attributes being complete and normalized.

That is why each category should have an attribute family attached: a product entering “Drills” knows what data it needs.

Your own tree and one per channel

Each channel has its own category tree, and it changes. If you use a marketplace's tree as yours, you are tied to its changes and cannot sell the same way on another channel. What works is:

• your own tree, designed for your catalog and your store;
• a mapping between your tree and each channel's, applied on export.

That way you change a product's category once and each channel receives its own.

Common mistakes

• An “Other” category that grows out of control. It is a sign the tree does not cover what you sell; review what is in it every month.
• Categories by brand. Brand is an attribute and a filter, not a branch of the tree, unless you sell a few very different brands.
• Internal names. A department code or a purchasing abbreviation means nothing to buyers or search engines.
• Duplicates under another name. “Drills” and “Rotary hammers and drills” as sibling categories confuse everyone.
• Changing the tree without mapping the old one. If you move categories, check that each channel still receives its own and that old pages are not left orphaned.

Keeping the tree alive

A taxonomy is not designed once and forgotten. Every season new products arrive that don't fit well, and categories grow unevenly. It pays to review from time to time which categories grew too much, which ended up empty and which products sit in a generic category because nobody knew where to put them.

How Bruxel handles it

In Bruxel each organization has its own category tree, and a category can carry a default attribute family inherited by its subcategories and by the products that enter it, as the attributes and families guide explains. Each product's category travels to each channel in the columns that channel defines when you export. If your catalog arrives without categories, Bruxel can propose them with AI for someone to review. To start with the basics, read what a PIM is.