Best way for navigation, niche E-commerce

[knubbz]

Hi community friends.

Ive have started to work on our 2.0 e-commerce store mostly when it comes to design and the ux.  Its a woocommerce setup and in total we have 34 products!

We have e niche site where we sell products as a system towards the building industry. Each product served its purpose within a construction detail and needs some explanation for a first time user/customer. So, first thing  we did now was to ad the short description to our loop to bring some more info to the user and guide them in the right direction quick.

Now the products are divided in to four categories. We actually gain a lot of traffic from those category landing pages and i am not so eager to change the way the products are categorised.

The old menu where built up by a sidebar with links to the different categories and to tags pages. Where the category where for example "Adhesive" and the Tag "Seal a window from the outside". The category gives the broader direction, and the tag gives the final usage/solution/purpose with the product.

In the 2.0 we would like to remove the sidebar in the product pages in favor for a full widht product page with more focus on the product and the specs. This leads us to put our navigation up in the main menu part for the desktop version.

Now to the questions.

1. Do you think that we are doing it the right way, to niche and set the final usage/path to our products with tags, or should it be done in another way?

2. For the UX, do you think that removing the sidebar navigation on the product pages will lead to a worse user/shopping experience?

Attached you can see some pics from our dev server where the new menu are being built up, and also the new product page layout. Please give me some feedback!

// J

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