Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be

[BobGW]

My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today?

Thanks.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Can you search for the products on the home page?

How much filtering would it take to find the product I'm looking for?

During a presentation at Pubcon, several experts said that the 2-3 clicks or less rule isn't true, and that you can get people to click more as long as the experience was beneficial and enjoyable.

Terrible example: I took over a website that forced you to fill out a search box before you were ever able to see the inventory.  To make matters worse, you actually had to fill one of the boxes before you could move ahead.  It was terrible for people just trying to browse my products.

However, being able to filter my searches when clothes shopping online is a life saver.  I'm a bigger guy, and don't like several colors.  So, I'm able to filter by size, style, color, etc. to be able to find what I want.  Each of those is a click.  I'd say the same thing about computer hardware.

The only real way to tell is by testing the website.  There are a few different programs out there where you can tell people the end result you want, and they have to try navigate the website.  You'll get a recording of their screen, as well as them speaking about the process.  These people are brutally honest, so try not to take offense ever.

[Sean_Dawes]

All depends how you can categorize them. I have done/worked on sites that are more than 2 clicks and they do just fine with revenue.

Do the 20 categories have any parent categories you can put them into to put in the navigation? Also what about drop down navigation. This can allow them to dive deeper if they want or browse if they need to.

Can you give me some examples or a screenshot?

[Chenzo]

Bob - that principal still applies and the quicker the visitor can be in front of a potential conversion/purchase - the better.

From ans SEO perspective though - do not rob yourself at creating as many as subpages of product pages as NATURALLY possible - splitting the products within niche - within niche.

Hope this helps.

P.S. - supply a Top 5-10 products which changes either monthly or quarterly with seasonal market trends with also boost conversion and overall appeal of your homepage.

your pal

Chenzo

[josh-riley]

The goal should be the fewer clicks to get to the RIGHT item. (Which is subjective, for sure.) People will do more clicks to get to better data, however we shouldn't put them through any more clicks than needed - so, if you can do it in two, great, but if you need 3-4, then do 3-4.

The one thing I have noticed is that (depending on how big your site is) more clicks to get to deeper content can make it harder for search engines to get in and crawl those pages, which can reduce ranking opportunity.