Hierarchical product trees arrange products into categories which describe them from general to increasingly specific characteristics, e.g. furniture/seating/task chairs.

This hierarchy allows buyers to "drill down" among a vast group of products to find precisely what they need. As buyers drill down the tree, they narrow their selection.

CustomCommerce supports industry-standard product trees, such as the UN/SPSC classification scheme, and customer-specific taxonomies.

For a customer with a multi-campus site, a furniture product tree might reference locations. This hierarchy would help a buyer select a chair for a specific space, e.g. a conference room in Building 3 on the main campus.

The drill-down approach to finding items can be slow when the category hierarchy goes many levels deep. CustomCommerce offers a variety of tools, including parametric search and direct specification, to speed the selection process.