A catalog structure should follow the way shoppers search for products, and your own convenience in arranging them comes second. The gap between these two logics costs a store half of its potential traffic.
Sequence
See what people call your products. The everyday name often has ten times more demand than the professional one.
Queries that lead to the same search results page make one category. Different results mean different pages.
From general to specific: section → category → subcategory. Beyond that come filters.
If a subcategory has fewer than eight products, it may be unnecessary for now – it works better as a filter.
Rules
Mistakes
Created "just in case", it sits there with two products and spoils the impression.
Four or five levels – the shopper gets lost, and page weight gets diluted.
The worst option: everything nobody had time to sort ends up there, and it doesn't sell.
We'll collect the keywords and build the structure of categories and filters – so the store gets found in search from day one.
