How Filters Can Help Your Shop

[burt]

When people visit your shop online, they don't want to scroll forever. They want to find what they’re looking for quickly. One easy way to help them might be `decade` and `year` filters.

What Are These Filters?

Think of it like this:

Decade filter: Show me all products from the 1980s or 1990s.
Year filter: Show me products from 1985 exactly.

Obviously such filters won't be suitable for all shops, but they might be for YOUR shop.

Shops That Might Use These Filters

Music stores -> find songs or albums from a certain decade.
Movie shops -> find films from a specific year.
Vintage clothes -> find clothes from the 70s or 90s.
Retro video games -> find games by release year.
Toy shops -> find toys from a certain year or decade.

If your shop sells products where the year matters, such filters might save your customers time and make your shop easier to use.

Easy Example: A Vintage Toy Shop

Imagine a shop called RetroPlay Toys. It sells toys from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Without filters:

A customer scrolls through hundreds of toys trying to find one from the 1980s.

With filters:

Step 1: Pick a decade

1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s

Step 2: Pick a year

If the customer clicks 1980s, they can then choose:

1980
1981
1982
...
1989

Why this helps:

• Casual buyers can explore their favorite era quickly.
• Collectors can find an exact toy from a specific year.
• You can create themed collections like "Top Toys of the 90s" and sell more.

BOTTOM LINE

Adding decade and year filters makes it super easy for customers to find what they want, which helps you sell more without frustrating anyone.

[burt]

rptoys.png

[14Steve14]

Going to sound a daft question, but is there a way to have these filters but not in a column. Lots of sites no longer use left and right columns, so could they be added horizontally? I know they have to go vertical an smaller devices but is there any advantages or disadvantage to using a horizontal bar. The internet seems to accept both.

[burt]

@14Steve14 the layout you describe is the layout I prefer;
No side columns, just have filtering/sorting `horizontal` above the list of images.

--

The image is just an example, in case we have anyone here thinking "what's that idiot on about".

[Dan Cole]

Based on the various discussions we've had about the ability to filter products in the past I think there is plenty of interest in having a system like that. Having one that sorts by Year isn't of much interest to me but if it had the ability to add other filtering options ie sizes, colours etc I think that would be well received.

Dan

[burt]

add other filtering options ie sizes, colours etc I think that would be well received

I agree. Decades/Years is a fairly simplistic example to try to get some discussion on the subject.

Imagine the possibilities individual shop could have any "Filters" they decide.

So a Health & Beauty shop might have;
Skin Type (Dry, Oily, Sensitive), Ingredients (Vegan, Organic) etc

Whereas a Book shop might have;
Genre (Sci-Fi, Crime, Romance), Format (Hardback, Paperback, eBook), Language (English, Chinese, Spanish) etc

Thinking forward, what if the Filters talked to each other?

Let's revert to the simple "RetroToys" example

Decade: 80s, 90s, 00s
Year: 1981, 1982 ... 1989, 1990 .. 1999

The user chooses Decade - 80s, then the Year Dropdown reacts and just shows 1981, 1982...1989.
That would be, I think, quite a cool `upgrade` to allow buyers easier way to "find" products.

[burt]

Discussion, open for all. Let's get something going here...get involved!

1. What do you sell in your shop?

2. What options would help customers narrow things down when browsing?
(For example: size, brand, colour, year, etc.)

[Kofod95]

I help a shop that sells wine, spirits etc. We have one category for all wines and allow filtering for types (red, white, fortified sparkling etc), sub-types (Champaign, de-alcoholiced, port, sherry etc), Country (France, Italy, Australia etc), district (Burgundy, Veneto, Napa Valley etc), production (conventional, ecological, biodynamic), casking (short, 10 years, 20 years etc), taste-profile (dry, semi-dry sweet etc) and price-ranges.
Other categories (like pipes or cigars) have other types of filters. I could list them all, but we have around 40 "filter categories".

Ours is built to allow filtering product-data (each column from table.products can be selected as a filtering option), attributes and specifications. "Filter categories" (type, country etc) are created in admin, where you can choose which specification group, attribute or product data it fetches its data from.

Shop side, each product listing shows filters that will return at least one product. Choosing a filter, removes filter categories and filter options that are not relevant.

//Daniel

[cbs]

This type of thing would be helpful, being able to filter based on chosen specifications would be good.

We have a product specification list based on S04e10 (Product specs), being able to narrow down search results based on this would be great.