Product Filtering for Your Online Store | Shoporama

A customer who lands on a category page with 2,000 items isn’t looking for 2,000 items. She’s looking for just one. With product filtering, she can narrow down the results to the few items that are actually relevant, without having to scroll through 40 pages first. Product filtering is available in the Montana and MontanaB2B themes.

What filters do for a large product selection

Take a category with 2,000 products. If you display 50 per page, the customer would have to go through 40 pages to see the entire selection. She won’t do that. She’ll scan the first page, not find what she came for, and go back to Google. If, instead, you set up three filters, those 2,000 items are whittled down to a handful on a single screen. The difference between these two experiences is the difference between an order and a lost visit.

Which three filters make sense depends on what you’re selling. A clothing store narrows down by size, color, and price. A home improvement store filters by supplier and inventory status, because the customer needs the item today. A specialty store filters by the characteristics its customers use to identify products in its selection. You choose them yourself.

The impact grows with the size of your product range. The more items you have, the more expensive it is to let the customer search on their own, and the more you stand to gain by making it easy.

You decide what can be filtered by

You build the filter yourself in the admin panel, and you choose both which filters (facets) to include and the order in which they appear. You can filter by:

• Only in-stock items
• Brand and supplier
• Subcategories of the category the customer is currently viewing
• Product labels of your choice
• Profile attributes such as size, color, or language
• Price, either using your own intervals or rounded intervals automatically calculated based on your prices

Profile attributes are the ones your variants are based on. Each facet is given the name the customer will see. If you’ve used a field for something other than what the name suggests, simply name the facet based on what you’ve actually entered in the field. If the manufacturer is listed in the brand field, the facet is called Manufacturer. For profile attributes, two values that mean the same thing can be combined into a single option, so that “S” and “Small” no longer appear as two separate options.

You also decide where the filter appears. If you select no categories, it applies to all category pages; if you select a few, the wine shop’s filter with vintage and region will only appear to the customer in the wine categories.

The customer sees what each selection yields

Next to each option, it shows how many items it yields, calculated based on the settings of the other filters. If there are no items associated with an option, it won’t be displayed at all, and a facet with no values is skipped entirely. Options that lead nowhere are therefore not displayed.

Selected filters appear as small buttons with a checkmark over the result, plus a “Clear All” button. On mobile, the filter opens in a full-screen panel when the customer taps the Filter button. Pagination and sorting are preserved so the customer doesn’t lose their place.

Filters That Don’t Harm Your SEO

The customer’s selections are included in the URL, so a filtered result can be bookmarked, shared via email, or sent to a customer in chat. At the same time, filtered pages are excluded from Google, and the search engine is directed to the plain category page instead. This way, thousands of filter combinations don’t clutter the search results.

A filter can also have its own page at an address like /filter/gift-ideas, where you set the selection yourself based on categories, product labels, brands, or only items in stock. This is an ideal landing page for newsletters and ads. The filter can also be displayed in search results, where the need is often greatest.

The price filter calculates the price the customer sees—that is, the sale price when the item is on sale. Promotional prices are not included in the price ranges.

Requires Montana or MontanaB2B

Product filtering is available in the Montana and MontanaB2B themes. Other themes, such as Delaware, California, Washington, and Alaska2, do not support it, nor do custom-built themes. The menu item Design → Filter only appears when your store is running a theme that supports filtering.

In Montana, the filter and the category menu share the same left column. Under Design → Theme Settings → Category Pages, you can therefore hide the category menu on pages where a filter is present.

Getting Started

If your store runs on Montana or MontanaB2B, you’ll find the filter builder under Design → Filter. Here, you can create your first filter and add facets one at a time. If you’re unsure whether filtering makes sense for your specific product range, email support@shoporama.dk, and we’ll take a look at it together.