Navigating the 10,000+ SKU Challenge

1Starting with Traditional Categories

We'll use hand tools as our example throughout this case study to illustrate the principles that we applied.

Like most eCommerce stores, we begin with categories. You obviously want to separate the wrenches from the screwdrivers. A generic menu structure typically looks like this (usually alphabetized):

What we sometimes see is that companies (or product managers) take the screwdrivers subcategory and further expand it by adding additional subcategories:

You can see how the goal of giving customers options is well-founded, but the structure becomes a bit "spider-webby." We've seen cases where each subcategory has its own landing page, which then requires more pages to load, more content to manage, and leaves customers feeling like they're going down a rabbit hole.

2Understanding What Customers Want

Every customer falls into one of these scenarios:

In this case study, we focused on addressing the last two scenarios. This approach is especially relevant for:

• B2B Websites where business customers search through categories for regular orders or special one-offs
• Enthusiast Websites where users want to discover additional merchandise in their interest area
• Specialized Retailers where customers might find a general product category but need very precise specifications

3The Solution: Attribute-Based Filtering

This is where we introduced attribute-based filtering. We'll describe how we implemented this specifically on the Magento eCommerce platform.

Think about attributes as "product adjectives." A sweater might include obvious adjectives such as:

But can also include much more specific qualities:

Returning to our tools example, imagine a customer navigates to the screwdrivers category. Instead of facing hundreds of different screwdrivers with no way to narrow their selection, we developed and deployed these filtering attributes:

Now the customer can select which attributes are most important to them and filter accordingly.

Instead of manually typing the color for every product added to the website, we pre-define them in the attribute fields. This creates a standardized set of data to work with, ensuring consistency and enabling effective filtering.

4Organizing with Attribute Sets

The next level of organization involves attribute sets. This is where it gets more sophisticated—but that complexity is our problem to solve, not yours.

For example, if you sell clothing, you don't want to have to scroll past dropdown options for collar type or sleeve length while trying to input data for sneakers. So we group attributes into logical sets.

By assigning all screwdrivers with the "screwdriver" attribute set, we ensure that when adding hammers to the catalog, the system doesn't ask irrelevant questions about driver types.

Results

By implementing this attribute-based filtering system, this client was able to dramatically improve customer navigation without overwhelming them with excessive subcategories. The approach preserved the simplicity of the main navigation while giving customers powerful tools to find exactly what they needed.