Product Listing Pages (PLPs)

The workhorse of your site is your Product Listing Pages (PLPs). They present your product offer and sort it for the customer through your category tree. Depending on your site platform or any 3rd party tools your site may also use, the order in which your products appear in a PLP can be data-based in an algorithm or manually sorted by business users. An algorithm that sorts your product will do most of the heavy lifting across your site. A manual sort of products will enable you to curate multiple brands or categories in an almost editorial way to inspire customers and ensure you can override rankings when a data-based solution may not be your best option.

PLP TYPES

By nature, a PLP is a collection of products based on a common attribute. What that common attribute is can be totally up to you, but there are some standard PLP types most businesses use:

1. Product category
   This aligns to your Category Tree, and will include products of the same category. Often this has multiple layers, so that a customer can drill down into a more granular type of product from Level 1 (L1) to 2, 3 etc. This will make up the majority of your top navigation for your store.

2. Product brand
   This will show all products under a certain brand, so that if customers want to explore an offer that way it’s available to them. A common pathway into these PLPs is by clicking on the brand in a product’s PLP, but you can also serve a holistic brand list in your navigation.

3. New arrivals
   Depending on what you sell, there may be a customer appetite to see what is new in your offer. That means that this page can be an assortment of brands and categories, so it can take some curation to order it in a way that inspires and engages a customer.

4. Sale products
   When you are on promotion for your store, you can replicate your category PLPs for just those on markdown. This gives customers an easy way to shop your sale, but also can act as a key CTA for your marketing activity. Depending on how your site works, you could choose to remove sale products from the rest of the site and only host them here.

5. Manual curation
   This type of page is often born out of either customer need or marketing campaigns, but there is certainly a place for edits of your product offer that don’t necessarily fit into any of the other PLP types. This could include birthday gift ideas, what your children might love for summer in the garden, or all the ingredients you’ll need to make chocolate chip cookies. As they fall outside the standard set, focus on how you’ll drive traffic into them.

PLPs also tend to be structured in a way that is familiar to users, with user controls like sorts and filters as well as supporting content like a header and even content injected through the rows of products. It’s critical that this structure is responsive to devices as a majority of users browse on their phone so though we all try to optimise on our computers at work, it should always be sense-checked on a mobile as that is how most of your customers will experience it.