When you are an e-commerce company, you will have several collections to showcase to your customers, whether it’s dresses, coats or everything in between. Mindful collections that are populated correctly but designed efficiently have proven effects for maximum user engagement and sales.
Here is a guide on how you can design product collections for maximum impact, so that your e-commerce business can kickstart a long-term growth strategy. Continue reading to find out more.
Strategic Placement & Navigation
The goal is always to make things easy for the customer to purchase and find goods.
Navigation
You will need to ensure that you have a search tool on your website to provide maximum convenience for returning customers or those who already know what they want, as they may have followed the brand for a while before purchasing.
Keep it simple
You want to ensure that the navigation is simple and includes clear descriptions of what this page will show the customers; therefore, the abaya dress collection should include and show only abaya dresses. You want to ensure that all of the collection pages are in the navigation and any sub-collections are a drop-down from the most related core collection. However, the simpler and more refined, the better.
Descriptive Names
You want to ensure that products are easy to find in the search tool, so ensure that you are clear and descriptive in the name and the description for each product, but also the collection. You could ensure that you include a snippet of Connect for users to reach before scrolling through the page.
Mega Menus
If you are an e-commerce company with a large range of collections and products, consider a mega menu. Instead of a simple dropdown showing only a single column of links, a mega menu expands into a large panel when triggered. This usually displays multiple columns of organised links, often featuring images and promotional banners.
Homepage Placements
Best Sellers
You want to ensure that your bestsellers are easy to find, and this is usually why you will always find them from other competitors right at the top of the page. This prevents potential customers from bouncing off the website and encourages them to make a purchase quickly. But also having collections such as ‘best sellers’ or ‘new arrivals’ tends to be linked to drawing the immediate attention of customers who are new to the brand.
Targeted Collections
You want to encourage customers to buy for seasonal, holiday and other factors so creating collections such as ‘Summer 2026’, ‘Black Friday 2026’ or ‘Wedding Guest Dresses’ are a hub for customers who are looking for things but are not sure what they want for occasions, which is a great way to show them a range of products and encourage different products to be added to cart and purchased.
Visual Hierarchy
This is good from both a marketing and user experience perspective. Visual hierarchy ensures that collections that are linked to driving more purchases and clicks are populated with high-quality imagery, persuasive titles and so forth.
Filtering and Sorting
Filters
As mentioned above with regard to the search tool, you can allow customers to refine their search so as not to be bombarded with products that don’t meet their needs and requirements. This could include filtering products that aren’t available in a specific price, colour and size, which makes the user experience simpler and effective.
The most annoying thing for a user is when you have spent time scrolling through products, and every single one you click on is out of stock in your size. To refine means customers who are avoiding disappointment are more likely to decide between the products readily available.
Smart Sorting Options
Offer essential sorting options, such as “best match” or “price low to high”. These are features you will find on most modern-day e-commerce websites and are a great tool for customers to use to improve their shopping experience.
Intelligent Product Population
Primary Collection
These are products that should be assigned to the most relevant and natural collection; for example, a black t-shirt should go in the t-shirt collection. Ensuring that all the core collections that aren’t refined are within these collections is key, but also ensuring to remove out-of-stock items that will not be coming back to keep it refined and condensed with products that users can actually buy.
Secondary Collections
These consist of your “best sellers” or “winter collections”, which are populated with the most relevant products from other core collections. Secondary collections are essentially overlapping existing primary collections for more of a strategic discovery, but also to create a ‘wardrobe’ of ideas to show a user may need for a holiday or summer outfits and so forth.
Secondary collections are just as important as primary collections, but ensure to populate them with relevant products that are described within the collection. So in a summary collection, you can’t include best-selling tracksuits as they’re not compatible or useful for the user. Ensuring these collections are curated carefully and with ALL of the relevant products to avoid missed purchases.