Categories for Retail Suggestions (In Store & Online)

[cscstore]

Hello Square Community!

We are a retail clothing store that is currently trying to restructure the categories in our Square Inventory.

We're focusing on developing an online store to handle pickup orders and shipping.
We've been talking to our younger staff, and they gave us some feedback on a possibility on how to arrange our categories to organize both the in-store items, and for the future website.

They do online retail shopping and this is a layout they prefer:

• 
  • Reference from another big chain retailer
  • Red = Items we are not selling
  • Yellow = Optional for final navigation bar
• For the Website Navigation Bar, it works best for them to have the categories of items sold rather than a page navigation bar. We agree since it would allow shoppers to immediately start finding the type of product they would like to purchase
• Different subcategories breaking down what items are available for each main category (ex= Men's → Jeans)
• This layout would be copied over, to an extent, to each other main category (Women's, Kids' & Youth, etc.).

We had started experimenting with the navigation bar and got a version of it working:

We're currently having issues replicating the example provided, and wanted to ask if anyone thinks it's possible to do this using the current Square Online / Categories tools?

What Parent/Subcategory structure would work best?
Some items can fall into multiple categories (ex. Brand selling both men's and women's clothing) so it's difficult to find a good structure for this.

We're open to suggestions, so any information would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you 🙂

[DinaLRosenberg]

This is super hard.. You want to have enough categories/subs but not too many.

I would start with breaking down women / men / shoes / accessories (if you have those)

Then I would sub down

Dresses, Jeans, Pants, Sweaters, etc

Keep in mind that the user can always search on brand even if it isn't a category

Even though we don't sell clothing we do have something similar on our website shopamityvilleapothecary.com

[cscstore]

Hey @DinaLRosenberg !
Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Yea it's getting a little complicated for us 😅
We have a separate post that is a little more in-depth with the Category structures
https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-for-Retail/Adding-one-Subcategory-to-different-Parent-cate...

You make a very good point regarding the Brands not being used in a category. If an item name has the Brand included in it, then customers would be able to find the item by just searching for the Brand.

We're currently deciding on whether or not to go this route (Parent Category = Men's/Women's/etc.) or with Brands as the Parent Category.
We'll see what we decide on.

A question for you would be:
- What is your experience using the navigation bar with your item/services categories on your website?
- From your experience, is it possible to have more categories drop down further when using the Mega Menu navigation bar?

Thanks again for your input! 😊

[DinaLRosenberg]

So- I think it depends what it is you're selling. For clothing I would do women's/men etc because there may be something I'm looking for in a style/silhouette that isn't brand dependent OR I might not think of a certain brand as carrying a certain silhouette or piece.

For example, I just recently bought a ton of Lucky Brand Jeans and clothing and I haven't bought that brand in YEARS they just totally hit the mark on trends.

The only exception would be if I"m looking at a bag reseller- in that case I would want the bags separated into maker (Chanel, Louis, Etc).

On our website we don't drill down too deeply on category because I think when it comes to human behavior you want to leave room for people to surf around and maybe find something that delights them that they weren't looking for.

We have seven master categories on our website with a few sub categories. We didn't want categories to go into "more".. in "more" you'll find our policies and FAQ

[cscstore]

Very helpful perspective you provided!

Love the idea of setting things up in a way for curiosity to lead while exploring a site.
Retail businesses (especially online) really rely on filters since there are so many options to choose from. We may have to find a balance in the amount of filters we use, and encouraging customers to explore the site.

We'll discuss it over here on our end to see what works best for us.

Appreciate your time! 🙏