So I want to talk about a page in your store. That is, that has the potential to be one of the highest performing pages to get people into action to find a product and actually get to the sale. However, it’s also one of the pages that’s most often neglected, underserved and under-appreciated in your store. And that page is the collection page. Okay?

So the collection page, also known as a category page, is where you group products of a similar type. So you may have a clothing collection or, you know, if you’re selling bicycles, you may have all kids bikes in one category, a women’s category, a mountain bike category, full-suspension category, front shock, only category, cruiser category, things like that, right? And it’s a way to group like and similar products into a place where a buyer or a visitor or a shopper can go look at all those products Have a similar type and start selecting which of the ones that interest them the most, or which ones they’re interested in the most that allow them to continue on into the process. 

Now, whether you’re on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, whatever, they all have their own, you know, category slash collection, default functionality where you simply assign a product to a collection or to the category. And then that’s it. And it automatically populates the page, it automatically organizes the page and displays the page has whatever widgets and stuff that it has on there, and that’s where most people leave off. They stop. They think, Okay, well, I’ve done it, I’ve got the collection. I’ll link to it from my homepage for my navigation menu, and I’m good. 

Alright, that couldn’t be further than the truth. Okay, the collection page, or the category page, I’m just going to, I’ll probably use the term back and forth, but they’re the same thing. The collection page is actually one of the main pages on your website where visitors will spend the most time and have the ability to spend the most time or time-on-site measurements can actually be skyrocketed, and you can go – the longer you can get a visitor spent on your site, the higher the likelihood of a conversion. Okay, so page timings and dwell time and all that stuff is very, very important. We want them to stay on the site. Okay? 

The problem is when they hit a collection page that’s not dialed in, and is not user friendly. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second. Makes them rebalance. Okay. So the purpose of a category page is to take them one step closer to finding what it is that they want. Okay. And for those shoppers who aren’t exactly sure what they want, or what they need, the category page, the collection page is supposed to be there to facilitate the visitor finding what it is that they want. 

The problem is that most category pages that we encounter, and then we come into contact with thousands and thousands of stores each and every year, and the vast majority of them have that default collection that I was talking about. So what should your category page be like? Well, the category page when I land on it, it will stick with the mountain bike examples for this video because it’ll keep it consistent. 

If I want to find mountain bikes, I’m not interested in every mountain bike, maybe I’m … and the store has 600 skews, 600 different mountain bikes, well, if I’m a man, then I’m probably not interested in women’s bikes. If I’m looking for myself, I’m probably also not interested in kids’ bikes. 

Okay, so if I go to a collection page or a category page, and it’s this blob mass of all these products that I have to sort through and they’re just tons and tons of them and things like that, I’m gonna get overwhelmed. I’m gonna get frustrated cause I don’t want to scroll through things that I don’t want to see. Okay? 

So there should at the very least be a filtering option. So the simple way would be to have like a men’s-kid’s-women’s category three different little things where you could select through, okay, or maybe they click men’s and it only shows in the men’s bikes, okay, very simple to set that up. But that’s the most basic version of it. 

Think about stores that you shop at online that you use a lot, okay? And that you actually use the filters like BestBuy, or Wayfair, which is phenomenal with their filtering system or even Amazon, right. So they have filters like for the mountain bikes, they may have colors, they may have a type, they may have suspension, they may have, you know, men’s-women’s-female, which is, you know, men, women or children, excuse me, they may have a downhill bike, road bike, street bike, beach bike. they may have all these different filter options so that when you select – if I want a full-suspension mountain bike, I can select mountain bike and full suspension and everything else that’s not a mountain bike and full suspension disappears. Okay? I need those options because that way I can get to what I’m looking forward to if you only have, let’s say you have 600 products, but only six that are men’s and full suspension. 

Well, why should I have to wade through 600 products, you’re wasting my time. you’re not doing me as the visitor a service okay? So when it comes to filters, you should have as many filters as possible that are relevant. Don’t have filters, like if you have a fragrance filter, but you’re selling mountain bikes, most of your mountain bikes probably don’t have a scent. So that makes no sense, right? You want to have filters that are relevant, okay. 

And you want to have as many different filters that are relevant to the consumer, to the shopper. When you’re shopping for the mountain bike, maybe they care about weight. Is it a heavy bike? Okay, maybe they care about gear ratio, or how many gears it has? Do they care if it is an aluminum frame bike or a wireframe bike or things like that? What are the frame styles? all of those things that are important to them. All right, the size bikes have different, you know, sizes based on the height of the person. 

You need to have all of those in there. Now, where do you have them? You should have it in the most prototypical layout that you possibly can. prototypical meaning, the same layout that they’re used to seeing on other stores they frequent considering that 53 cents of every dollar is spent on Amazon when shopping when going online. Amazon’s a good one to make sure you mimic in that regard. So that would be left-aligned, Navigation vertically down the side of the page. Okay, and their checkboxes. When they check it, it selects only those items and all the other things that don’t relate to that checkmark or that tag disappeared. When they uncheck it, everything comes back, they should be able to select multiple checkboxes, they should be able to unselect the checkbox without having to click a reset button or anything else. 

Now, you should also have your over on the top right, you should still be able to sort by bestseller, sort by price: low to high price, high to low, and those kinds of filters as well. Now, those are the default filters that almost all category pages have. But those are not enough in and of itself. 

Now, for example, a lot of your shoppers are not coming with a very specific purchase in mind. They may be coming with a general vibe or just browsing or they’re trying to narrow it down. So let’s go back to the mountain bike example. I’m a guy. I came to Mountain View mountain bike store and I want to buy a mountain bike. Okay, my last mountain bike was really heavy. But I don’t want a heavy mountain bike this time. I also don’t really know what I want other than I need to be a mountain bike and I want a guy’s bike. Okay. 

So I’m looking through, you have 600 options. Okay, I don’t know, do I need a full suspension? Do I need this? I don’t know what I want yet? But I do like red. So I want to ride a red bike. So I want to be able to select men’s bikes, men’s bikes, mountain bikes, red, okay. And then it will select all those bikes. Okay. But my other consideration was I didn’t want a really heavy bike, I don’t know what is heavier than others. So then I could go over to another filter, and I could select sort by weight, lowest to highest, okay, or highest to lowest, right? 

Then it’s gonna reorganize those selections of men’s mountain bikes that are red, and allow me to see in order, which one’s the heaviest and the least heaviest, or the lightest or the heaviest, and only those categories that I want. 

And as I start looking at them, then maybe I’m like, Oh, you know what, I think I only want Front shock, like I don’t need full suspension. So I can select front shock, or Deselect full suspension, and boom, it will take those away and narrow my choices even more. 

Now, I’ve been served with the most relevant information that I need to make the decision of which bike I want to click through to see the product page on. When you allow me to do that, you’re making my shopping experience good, you’re showing me that you care about me as a customer and that you actually want to help me find what I like. And you’re not just trying to make a quick buck off me. And I feel confident that I am able to make the right decision on the purchase that I’m trying to make. Okay? So those filters are critical. 

All right. Now, also, if you have tons and tons of products and categories, let’s say you have, you know, I don’t know two or three pages worth of products, you don’t want to use pagination, okay, which is where they get to the bottom of the page, it says to go to page two, go to page three, go to page four. It’s better to use a load more button that when they click it, it loads the next page so to speak within the same window that they were already on. It’s much easier for a mobile experience. It’s much easier for everything.

Another point that mentioned mobile is you never want to use dropdowns if you can avoid it for your filtering, you always want to use checkboxes and expand and collapsible menus down the left-hand side, or potentially a narrowed version across the top on mobile, that could work as well. But when you’re trying to scroll on on a mobile category page, and you’re scrolling with your thumb or your finger, and then you’re trying to select a drop-down and then scroll through the drop-down, it becomes problematic and it makes for a really bad user experience, which is frustrating and then the user will bounce. 

Now, if you’re not utilizing all of these things, on your category page, then you are making it – you’re doing a disservice to your customer. And I would venture to say that if you were watching your tracking and your session tracking all that to see how your users are, you would find that your category page is one of the biggest leaking points of your business. you’re losing customers, you’re losing visitors heavily on that category page, or instead, it could be a major boon And major help to your store. 

Guys, there’s a bunch of tips for your category page and apply those, get those out there. There are apps out there that will allow you to instantly and easily add filtering and category options to your page, to your category page, so you don’t have to try to custom code it or anything. Don’t reinvent the wheel. 

There’s good stuff out there, just make you find an app that allows for the features that you need based on the product types that you’re selling and what your visitors are looking for. And if you want more tips on how to dial in your store, watch these videos right here. Okay, and also don’t forget to click the button below to subscribe and click the little bell icon to make sure you get notified on every video we release.