Ecommerce navigation: build the menu from how your customers shop

Name the menu the way customers shop, not the way you stock

Menus tend to mirror how the business is organised: ranges, suppliers, the names the product team uses. Customers shop by need. Gifts for her, food for a puppy, something for a small kitchen. When the two don't match, people guess, and guessing on a phone is how sessions end.

Your search box already knows the right words. Shopify's analytics has a report of the searches that returned nothing, and it often reads like a list of menu items you haven't got. Start there.

On a phone the menu hides, so the first screen does the work

On mobile the main menu sits behind an icon, and every tap it takes is a tap some people won't make. So the first screen has to do the guiding.

• Search visible at the top, not tucked inside the menu
• Your top collections as tiles on the homepage, named in customers' words
• Filters that work with a thumb: size, colour, price, in stock
• Breadcrumbs on product pages, so a dead end has a way back

Menus, filters and the search engines reading them

The menu is also your strongest set of internal links. Collections in the main menu read as your important pages, to shoppers and to Google alike, so the menu is an ecommerce SEO decision as much as a design one.

Filters are the trap. Every combination of size, colour and price can become its own address, and search engines can waste their visits crawling thousands of near-copies. Keep filters for shoppers, and keep those pages out of the index.

What your navigation tells Klaviyo

Every click through your menu is a signal. The category browse flow can write to someone who looked at a collection and opened nothing, and the site search flow can follow up a search that went nowhere. Both lean on collection names and search terms that mean something to a customer.

A collection called Edit Seven tells a shopper nothing. Neither does an email reminding them they looked at it.