Catalogue Design and Development Considerations

[RakeOne]

Hi alll,

I'm currently in the process of reworking the whole of my Fathers online site. www.snowsun.com. Needless to say it's a mess!

I'm more concerned with how customers would like to be presented the products, so am looking for advice before I start inputting the bulk of this seasons products. -Due in October.

Currently we have several makes each with there own model.

Currently I'm looking at Skis (Catagory Selection) -> Ski (Product Type (Subsection)) -> Armada (Product Make (Subsection))... Under which I intend to list all the models that we stock, say 10 per Make.
-An issue I have is that I think I will need an additional sub-section to seperate out the Male, Female and Kids models per make but am wary that this will annoy customers having to click through so many pages to get to the products of interest.

Ultimately my intention is to have all the products displayed as thumbnails under each make, with only price and model brief being displayed above each. -Upon clicking or mouseover (Or maybe through some shiny flash code) the product specific product information is displayed. -Tech Spec etc.

Any help always appreciated.

Thanks,
Kristopher (RakeOne) @ SnowSun.com

[pinbrook]

You could have Male/Female/kids as the top level selector

The best organisation really depends on how people buy skis. ie are most of your sales for one pair?

if its one then i'd suggest

Male:Skis:Armada - thus your average male shopper only has to negotiate one section.

Think about clothes shops - they dont put all the trousers in one section and then split into ladies/gents/kids

[leehack]

Nothing to stop you providing multiple methods of shopping, don't try and guess which is best, provide all methods and monitor which are used and get real stats to work off then.

By brand, by gender, by size, by product, by price are all possibles you could consider, copy - paste as duplicate to put products in mutliple sections.

[RakeOne]

Thanks for the advice...

Thank you for your input.

Apols. I should have added on my initial post that we open Thurs-Sat during Summer months, and so haven't been so swift in reply.

So replication / reuse of products is a good thing in multiple catagories.

I do intend to use a menu system to help user navigation and remove the need for customers to click through multiple product catagories... Or at least that's the plan... Just need to find a good navibar menu.