Ninety products, sorted by material, helping nobody

Start with the question

A customer walks into a showroom and says they need flooring for a hallway.

Nobody sensible responds by pointing at the wall and saying, “We keep the oak over here.”

The person behind the counter asks what the hallway is like. How much traffic it gets. Whether there are children or dogs. What they want it to look like. Maybe they ask what they have in the rest of the house.

The conversation starts with the job.

The website starts somewhere else.

Open a flooring site and you can find oak. Then engineered oak. Then solid oak. Then herringbone. Then laminate. Then vinyl. Then whatever classification the business uses internally. There may be ninety products sitting behind those labels.

The customer has been given a filing system.

They came looking for an answer.

This is where a catalogue can become a problem even when every product in it is good.

The business has organised the stock correctly. The customer still doesn't know where to start.

Your categories make sense to you

There is a reason websites end up this way.

A business buys products in certain groups. Suppliers describe them in certain ways. The staff know the difference between the categories without thinking about it. The CMS needs somewhere to put each product, so those same categories become the navigation.

It feels tidy.

A customer doesn't arrive carrying the same filing system.

They arrive with a job.

They might be replacing a tired kitchen floor before selling the house. They might need something that can cope with a large dog. They might want the look of timber without the maintenance. They might have seen a picture online and want something close to it.

Material can matter once they are choosing between products. It can be useless as the first decision.

That distinction is easy to miss because the catalogue is built from the inside out.

Your staff need to know what something is. Your customer needs to know whether it will work.

Those are different pieces of information.

A site can contain every relevant product and still make the customer work too hard to find the right part of it.

The catalogue makes them qualify themselves

Imagine a fictional business called Harrow Floors.

Harrow sells ninety products. Its navigation has five main product groups, each with several subcategories. The product pages are good. They have photographs, dimensions, prices and technical information.

The customer lands on the site and chooses “Wood Flooring”.

Now they have twenty-four products.

They can filter by species. Finish. Construction. Board width.

None of those filters answers the question they arrived with.

They wanted to know which floors would suit a busy hallway.

The customer now has to learn enough about flooring to narrow twenty-four products down to something worth asking about.

That is a strange job to give a customer.

A salesperson would absorb some of that complexity. The website hands it back.

This is where a shortlist changes things.

Harrow could have a route called “For busy hallways”. It might lead to four products that the business is happy to recommend for that situation. Each one could explain the trade-off in ordinary language.

One is more expensive but gives the look they want. One is easier to maintain. One has a different construction that suits the room.

Now the customer has something to choose between.

They have also learnt something useful before calling.

The catalogue has become a conversation.

The staff already know the answer

Listen to the questions your staff answer repeatedly.

That is where the missing structure is.

If somebody calls and says, “We've got a kitchen with lots of sunlight, what would you recommend?”, the person answering doesn't open the stock system and read out every suitable product.

They narrow it.

If somebody asks, “What do people buy when they want the cheapest option that still looks decent?”, the answer probably comes quickly.

If somebody says, “I've got underfloor heating. Does that change what I can use?”, your staff know where the conversation goes next.

Those answers belong on the site.

Not necessarily as a giant FAQ page at the bottom of the navigation. They should appear where the decision happens.

A customer looking for a floor for a rental property might see a small set of appropriate options. Someone looking for a particular look might enter through photographs or room types. Someone who already knows the product they want can still get straight to the catalogue.

The point isn't to remove the catalogue.

People who know what they want should be allowed to find it.

The problem is making everybody start there.

Stock structure is for stock

There is nothing wrong with organising products by material.

Your staff may need that structure. Your suppliers may require it. Your stock records certainly do.

It just doesn't follow that the same structure should be the first thing a customer sees.

Think about a kitchen showroom.

The business might buy sinks, taps, ovens and worktops from separate suppliers. Its internal system can reflect that. A customer planning a kitchen doesn't experience the room as four purchasing categories.

They are trying to make a set of things work together.

The same happens with a website for a service business. A customer doesn't care that the company has divided its work into five internal service lines if they arrived wanting to solve one particular problem.

The website has to absorb some of that complexity.

That is the job of content architecture.

Intent first. Product second.

A customer who arrives with a clear product name can skip the first step. Someone who doesn't know the product name needs another way in.

This is why Intent-Led Commerce matters. It doesn't mean hiding the catalogue or inventing clever names for ordinary products. It means giving the customer a route based on the decision they are actually trying to make.

The call changes when the shortlist exists

There is a practical reason to care about this beyond the website.

The phone call changes.

Compare these two enquiries.

Those are different conversations.

The second customer has already done some of the work. Your staff can spend the call on the part that needs a person.

That doesn't mean fewer calls.

A good site may create more useful questions. Someone who has understood the options can ask about samples, fitting, lead times or whether a particular product will work in their room.

That is a better use of the phone.

It also gives staff something they can point to.

Instead of explaining the same distinction for the fiftieth time, they can send somebody to the page that explains it and continue from there.

The information has been captured once.

Your staff can still add the judgement that belongs to a person.

Try the catalogue without the catalogue

You don't need to rebuild your website to find out whether this is a problem.

Take one product category this week. Pick the one that generates the most questions from customers.

Then write down the last ten questions your staff remember answering about it.

Don't tidy them into marketing language.

Write what people actually ask.

Now look at the current category page.

Can a customer answer those questions without knowing the names of your product categories?

If they cannot, make a small page or section that starts from the situation instead.

Use the same products you already sell. Don't create a new range. Don't rename the stock.

Just make a route into it that begins with the customer's decision.

The stock system isn't the customer experience.

Sometimes the best thing you can do with a catalogue is stop making the customer start there.