inRiver Taxonomy

So what is a product taxonomy and why is it important?
A product taxonomy is the logical structure that is used to organize your products. Much like a department store organizes its products into certain areas of the store in order to help customers
find what they’re looking for.

If you are remotely interested in a PIM system, you are well aware of the importance of rich content about your products. According to Forbes; Eighty-eight percent of shoppers characterize detailed product content as being extremely important. But what good is detailed product content if shoppers can’t find your product to view it? For this reason, a great taxonomy is critical to helping your users find the products that they are interested in buying. If they can’t find the product, they can’t buy the product.

Fortunately, InRiver has provided us with the tools we need to effectively develop and maintain a flexible taxonomy structure to help your customers find the products they want regardless of if they are viewing your products on your own site, or on a distributor or marketplace.

It all starts in the Plan & Release application. In this application we can create our ‘channels’ each channel represents a publishing location for your product data. So if you sell your products on your own website, on Amazon, and on a distributor’s website you would likely create a channel for each of these.

Inside each channel we have channel nodes, and channel nodes can contain their own child channel nodes, creating a tree structure that will represent the category and subcategory structure of the site the products are being sold on. We can add products directly to our nodes through the simple and intuitive drag and drop interface that exists in the Plan and Release
app. Critically, channel nodes can be linked to multiple parents, giving our merchandisers the ability to duplicate parts of the taxonomy structure where it makes sense. This ensures that shoppers are not frustrated by being unable to find a product they are looking for because they are looking a logical, but ultimately incorrect category.

Oftentimes we want to make sure we are keeping some of our categories up to date with the correct products or the products that belong in a category change rapidly. Consider a ‘new products’ category in which we want to display all products that were added to the catalog. In this case we have a powerful querying tool that we can use to automatically add and remove products to a channel node as they meet the requirements of the query.

In conclusion, through the InRiver Plan and Release application we have the tools to develop a well-structured and dynamic taxonomy that will not only satisfy, but thrill, your customers by allowing them to discover that rich product content you’ve spend so much time and effort to produce.