Taxonomies at Shopping Sites

Shopping is one area on the Web where we see taxonomies deployed to assist users in product searches. This posting on Shopzilla Gets Organized compares Shopzilla to Pricegrabber, Yahoo Shopping, and Shopping.com and shows the variety of approaches. Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com clearly prefers the detailed categorization at Shopzilla.

Certainly he thinks that a strong taxonomy is good for the searcher and for the merchant.

"Starting with the big, bold pictures representing the categories and then moving down into cleaner/more robust filtering options and a more granular taxonomy, shoppers should be finding products easier (which makes for a better shopping experience) and merchants should be getting more relevant clicks (which improves ROI)."

Follow the screenshots on a search for football or the links for a search on 'home organization' to see the different treatments.