Amazon's Category Tree as an Interactive Sunburst Diagram

tl/dr: We created an interactive sunburst diagram using D3.js to visualize Amazon’s category tree

We played around with the incredible D3.js library recently to create some nice visualizations. One outcome is this zoomable sunburst diagram which displays Amazon’s categories from its US marketplace. As there are many thousand categories you cannot display them at once or even on the next level. So we used a different approach.

The size of each slides shows how many categories are below this one category in total, so not only on the next level.

This is how it looks like from the start:

Kindle EBooks seems to have many different categories below, esp. in the non-fiction area:

 

If you click on “Sports & Fitness” you get this image:

“Hunting & Fishing” seems to be very big. Much bigger compared to Germany’s related categories “Angeln” and “Jagd”.

Here is another example showing how big the “Accessories” category in Electronics is.

Benefits of Visualizing Amazon’s Category Structure

Understanding Amazon’s category tree helps sellers:

• Choose the most appropriate category for their products
• Identify less competitive subcategories
• Optimize their listings for better visibility