Enabling product filters

When you use product filters in your store, your customers find what they need much faster and, as a result, convert more easily. 

As you enable filtering options, store visitors can use them on your category and search pages to refine their search by prices, categories, availability, special offers, brands, colors, sizes, and more.

Tip: You instantly get more filters when you update your products with new product qualities.

If you run a multi-brand store with diverse inventories of 50+ items, using filters is just what you need to provide an excellent shopping experience to your clients and increase sales.

This feature is available on Professional and Unlimited Online Store plans.

Enabling filters

Before you switch on the filters, make sure you have enabled the Next-gen Storefront option in your Settings. To check, navigate to Settings and click on the What's New link.

Make sure the option Next-gen Storefront has been enabled. 

Once you toggle the switch, you are all set up for enabling filters.

Enabling filters

To switch on product filtering for your store:

1. Go to your Settings.
2. Click the Product filters link and click Enable Filters button.

That’s it! Online Store enables a list of filters that are most relevant to your catalog based on the information about your products like price, stock level, category, options, and attributes: 

For example:

• If you use categories for grouping your items, you’ll get a Category filter.
• If your products have sale prices and stock levels specified, On sale and In stock, filters will be enabled.
• In case your products have common options like sizes and colors, Ecwid will create Size and Color filters for you.
• If you have added brand names as product attribute values, they will become a Brand filter.

If you don’t see the filter you want among the suggested options, don’t worry and continue reading. You can manually add filters to create the best filtering tool for your buyers.

Adding new filters

As you enable product filtering, filters that are most useful for searching through your catalog are created automatically. The more products match the filtering criterion, the higher it is placed on the list.

At the same time, you may want to add some extra filtering options.

To add a new filter to your store:

1. Go to Settings → Product Filters.
2. Click Add Filter Criteria. Here you may find some filters that match fewer products but can also be useful to your buyers.
3. Click Add to enable a new filter.

Pay attention to the recommendations on improving the filter to match more products.

Creating new filter criteria

In case no filters are suggested on this page, it means that the Online Store could not find more filtering criteria for your items. This means you will need to create them by adding new product attributes or options.

Let’s say, you sell books with different cover types, but haven’t specified the types yet. To create a Cover type filter, you need to:

1. Go to your Settings → Product Types.
2. Create a product attribute that your products will share. 
3. Navigate to your Catalog and click Edit on the product that should be filtered by this attribute.
4. Open the Attributes tab and fill in values to the attribute field for each product. 
5. Attribute names and values spelled identically will be treated as a single filter. If they differ in case or spacing, they will be treated as different filters.
6. Proceed to Settings → Product Filters and click Add Filter Criteria.
7. Add the created attribute as a new filter. A list of checkboxes with the attribute values will now be available to your customers in the filters panel.

As you create new attributes and options for your products, new filtering options will become available to you on the Product Filters page.

Using filters to increase sales

With product filters enabled, you get a flexible tool for improving your customers’ shopping experience and boosting up your sales just out of the box.

Filters in your store use a smart algorithm that:

• Indicates how many products fall under it and updates the count each time a new filter is applied,
• Automatically hides the unavailable options as your products get sold to avoid searches with zero results,
• Allows customers to choose multiple options at once for better product comparison.

With all these features your customers will appreciate your big catalog because they can easily navigate it and quickly discover the products they want.

Your store will display the filtering options:

Using filters on category pages

When navigating to the category pages in your store, visitors can click Refine by and narrow the product listing based on their shopping criteria:

Using filters on the search page

When customers use the search bar to find something in your store, they land on the search page where they can further filter the suggested products according to their needs:

They can also quickly clear previous selections and view all your products without leaving the search page.

Managing filters

You can remove and sort filters to create a perfect filtering tool for your buyers.

To temporarily disable an active filter:

1. Go to your Settings → Product Filters.
2. Switch the toggle to the Disabled state on the filter.
3. To remove the unnecessary filter at all, click Actions → Delete on the filter.

 To change the order of filters in the storefront:

1. Сlick Actions → Sort on the filter.
2. Drag and drop filters to sort.

The order of filtering options will change both in your Online Store Control Panel and in the storefront.

Other helpful articles

Selling products and services using Products block

Adding new products

Making your products more noticeable with product ribbons

Selling digital products in Online Store