The easier it is for a shopper to find the products they want the more likely they are to purchase. Whether you have a large catalog, discerning customers, or collectible products, a filter can be a great way to help your shoppers drill through and find the products that are most appealing for them. Understanding how filters are applied and the different options is key to building a successful filter for your eCommerce site.
Filters are hard to build "out of the box" because e-commerce catalogs are all different. CommerceCM can filter based on departments, product attributes, or product specifications. These examples are from www.siddickens.com who launched a responsive e-commerce site based on CommerceCM in March 2018.
Sid Dickens wanted a four Facet search, each with multiple Criteria. We chose to base their search on Departments because of some other requirements the site had.
The Criteria are shown in drop down, touch friendly menus under each of the Facets. We used a scroll within the drop down because of the length of some of the Criteria lists. By default each Facet is set to select All.
When the filters are applied, the shopper can clear all Criteria with a single click or remove a single Criteria by tapping on the criteria label.
The pattern we chose was OR within a Facet and AND between Facets. So the filter settings above will return all Memory Blocks that are Blue OR Brown AND from 2017.
Many Blocks have multiple colours or themes so we did consider using AND in those Facets however it made no sense to use AND within Years and Collections. A Block is part of only a single Collection and is obviously only released in a single year.
At the same time, we had to use AND between Facets because using OR cast the net so wide that the results were confusing. You could have Blocks from 2017 returned that were neither Blue or Brown.
Other Filter Considerations
When to fire?
We also chose to fire the filter at the completion of each Facet. This is slightly more cumbersome than allowing a shopper to set multiple Criteria across a number of Facets however when tried that we had too many tests that ended with no results. Firing the product Filter across all Facets at once gives the shopper no feedback on which Criteria is the one blocking the results. In some cases a product that does not have all criteria is not worth purchasing (car parts) but in the case of Sid Dicken's Memory Blocks, most collectors and shoppers are interested in matching existing Blocks or a specific style or message. Seeing a close match is better than seeing nothing and leaving empty handed.
How many criteria is too many?
We leave this up to the merchant but the longer the list, the longer it will take a shopper to review and make their selection. If the Criteria are separated too finely then the results sets are too small and you increase the likelihood that a shopper will see nothing when they fire their Filters.
See the filters in action at www.siddickens.com
Do you want to make it easier for your shoppers to find products? We'd be happy to discuss your needs.
Tags: sid dickens, filter, ecommerce design