How deep should ecommerce categories be?

[BobGW]

Hello,

I have a client with 300 products. He's thinking of about 20 main categories built mainly with the user in mind. How deep should each category be?

For example, 3 clicks from the home page, 18 products on 2 pages (9 products per page)?

or 2 clicks from the home page simplifying as many categories as possible to get them on one page?

or what is the best practice for product indexing and usability?

Thanks.

[BobGW]

Awesome. will do.

How many clicks from the home page should the categories be for indexing, link juice, and usability?

The reason I ask is because there's a lot of items that go in multiple categories so we do subcategories and sub-sub categories

[danatanseo]

Hi Bob,

Having worked with both very large and very small e-commerce sites, I'd recommend in this particular case (especially if these 300 products are going to be broken into 20 categories), that it would be best to just keep the Nav as flat as possible and yes, avoid pagination and put all the products onto one page. Scrolling is faster then the latency of moving from one page of category results to another. It simplifies everything for users (and search engines too!).

Good luck!

Dana

P.S. When I say "put all the products onto one page," lol I did not mean that literally. I meant once the products are in their respective categories, leave the category pages so that all the products in that particular category are available on that one page.