Creating a clean and simple WooCommerce product taxonomy is a critical factor in converting web visits to online sales. If you are selling more than one product on WooCommerce, you’ll need to consider how to organize the products with categories, tags, or attributes.
However, it’s important to understand how each of these WooCommerce features work, before setting up your store. If web visitors get lost on your site while searching for a product, they’ll most likely leave the site and look elsewhere online.
WooCommerce Product Categories
Categories are a native feature of WordPress that group together posts, pages and custom post types with similar content. In WooCommerce, categories also help to structure and organize your products effectively.
Setting up categories in your store and logically grouping your products helps online shoppers easily browse and view your products, which impacts user experience and the overall success of your e-commerce site.
WooCommerce Tags
You may have heard of the term “tags” in relation to WordPress blog posts. You can add tags to custom post types in order to help organize them or improve the search results if you have a search tool on your website.
Product tags function in the same way as blog post tags in that they help you organize your products. However, tags cannot be organized in hierarchical order, so it’s best to use categories first to group products. Tags can be utilized for more unique, niche product details.
WooCommerce Attributes
A third way to organize products is to use product attributes. By setting up attributes, you can allow online shoppers to filter products more easily.
Product attributes are often used with variable products. A variable product means that there are numerous variations and options available and these may impact the price. Clothing is an example of a variable product because customers may need to select a color or size to make a purchase.
When setting up a variable product, you’ll set up global attributes, such as color and size. Then you can input the specific variations of colors and sizes for each product in WooCommerce.
Understanding Categories vs Attributes
A common mistake on WooCommerce websites is to mix-up the purpose of categories versus attributes. When setting up your store, think of categories as overarching groups, such as t-shirts, shoes, accessories, etc.
Product attributes then are more specific variations for a specific product, such as colors, size, etc. Once you’ve set up attributes, you can also utilize a WooCommerce widget “filter by product attribute” where a web visitor can further filter products by a certain color, for example.
