I've been refinishing my kitchen cabinets and I need to replace the hinges with a new style. Face Frame No-Mortise concealed hinges which are apparently very difficult to locate. During my search I found that a lot of cabinet hinge ecommerce stores had terrible category structures.

Almost every store divided products by brand. Who cares what brand my cabinet hinges are? I guess maybe some high end hinges are desirable but I'm looking for function not brand. Brand is how the owner's of the web sites think about hinges because they have to purchase them from manufacturers and know which hinges are most profitable and where they come from. As a shopper of hinges I need to find the ones that will work.

Think about how your customers will be looking for products. If the cabinet stores had created categories for types of hinges it would be easy to locate what I wanted to buy. In fact, the store where I did end up purchasing was the one that did have categories by functionality.

Do your categories match up with how customers actually look for your products or do they line up with how you think about your products? Call up some customers and find out.