Beauty and the Beastly Search: Finding Luxury in a Product Hierarchy

There has been considerable research on design of menu hierarchies in general spanning several decades. However there is much less research on menus relating to specific types of product in online retail settings. Thus there is little guidance in the research literature on specific issues such as how to place luxury items within a beauty product hierarchy, which is the focus of this paper. We report on a study that addressed this problem for an ecommerce site associated with a large Canadian retailer. In a within subjects design, participants searched for four beauty-related products (two of which were classed as “luxury” items) either in a hierarchy where luxury items were intermingled with other products addressing the same need (the “Combined” condition), or in a hierarchy where there was a split between luxury and non-luxury products at the top level (the “Split” condition). Segregating luxury products in the product hierarchy was found to lead to significantly slower, and more lengthy (in terms of links traversed), searches. Searches were found to be more efficient in the “Combined” condition than the “Split” Condition both when searching for luxury items, and when searching for non-luxury items. This work has implications for existing brick-and-mortar retailers moving into or expanding e-commerce portals. Our results suggest that the separation of luxury from non-luxury items in bricks-and-mortar stores does not transfer well to online product hierarchies, where similar segregation leads to poorer digital navigation performance.