Overview
Consumers love to shop by color on your website, and marketplaces like Google Shopping like you to define the color of the items you're selling. However, often retailers get carried away when assigning color attributes to their products. This article is meant to give some guidelines when assigning colors to the products in your catalog.
Problem
Many vendors give the products they make a fancy color name like Beluga, Gunsmoke or Prusse. Retailers will take these names and blindly add them to their website, and very soon their list of colors grows out of control.
The color options you enter will be the same options that show up on your website for consumers.
Shoppers have the attention span of a 10 year old boy and may not have the time or inclination to click on Beluga, especially when there's only one product. Worse, they may not understand what color Beluga is.
Solution
The solution is simple. Don't use the colors given to you by your vendors and designers. Instead, create you own list of colors and map the vendor's fancy color names to color names you've created. The following list will get you started:
- Black
- Blue
- Brown
- Gold
- Green
- Grey
- Orange
- Pink
- Purple
- Red
- Silver
- White
- Yellow
This approach allows shoppers to simply pick Brown to see all the different shades of Brown you offer. They aren't going to hold it against you if the Brown is really Chestnut. Using this approach will also group all Brown items together, making it easier for the consumer to shop by color.
You can always stick the fancier color name in the Product Name and Description, which will make your vendors happy and make you look trendy!
