How Custom Plugs use the Product Filter & Search App to improve Collection Filtering

June 17, 2024

October 19, 2020

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5 min read

Custom Plugs are an online retailer of plugs & gauges, tunnels, body jewelry and more. They use Shopify for their online sales and have partnered up with Liquify Shopify Experts to help them with design, development and SEO.

Here Joe Dempsey from Liquify, explains why they used Boost Product Filter & Search App for this project.

About the author

Joe Dempsey is a front-end Shopify expert and developer based in London. His team at Liquify Web Design (Digital Angels Ltd) has been officially recognized by Shopify since 2013. Their clients are mostly Shopify Plus stores with large inventory ranging from startups to retail giants like Tesco.

Have a look at his portfolio or contact Joe Dempsey via LinkedIn.

Why was the Product Filter & Search App Chosen

You'll quickly find with Shopify that you almost always need an app for filters and search. The Filters you can do natively theme side are simply not good enough for most retailer's needs. This is where apps come in.

We've basically worked with all search and filter apps on Shopify as well as some custom integrated ones like Apptus and Searchspring. For this project, we chose Boost Product Filter and Search. The reasons can be summed up as:

We've used the app before and it's robust & stable without significant downtime or outage
It allows stacked filters which aren’t supported theme side natively with or conditionals e.g. filtering by wood or stone
It allows you to define filter trees on collection by collection basis e.g. so we can define a different set of filters for plugs as we can for clothing
It allows basic merchandising so they can promote certain products with a collection and define rules to automate this.

Stability has been a big issue with other apps we've used but we've not seen any significant downtime from Boost Product Filter & Search App & we use this on many Shopify & Shopify Plus stores.

Do you need to be a developer to use the app?

No, you don't. The app can be installed and used without the need for a developer as the team at Boost Commerce will manage the theme install which needs to be done manually. Typically we prefer to do our own manual installs & customizations.

How long did it take to set the app up?

Basic setup took a few hours for this app all-in. Custom plugs have a large inventory and we needed to create the filter trees along with product tagging automations with another app to make this possible.

E.g. you'll see that the engraved wood plugs collection has a different set of filters to the tunnels collection as well as to the stone plugs. All that took quite a while to set up but was quite easy using the Boost app

The filter tree on the engraved wood plugs collection has a color swatch filter option for Engraved material.

The tunnels collection features Material and Shape/Style filter options.

Although the filter options are the same, the option values in the stone plugs collection is not totally identical to other collections.

What about the search functionality?

This app manages search and filter pretty much flawlessly with instant search, synonyms and stop words all bundled in for advanced users. You should find everything you need here. We can't find fault with it - especially now it supports metafields and multilingual.

Check out the details of Shopify search features by Boost Product Filter & Search.

Would I suggest using this app?

Absolutely - this is as good as it gets from the Shopify app store. There are some better

products around for enterprise clients but these are expensive - costing thousands per month and requiring custom integrations.

Boost Product Filter & Search app is staying ahead of the game by introducing metafields (much overlooked in Shopify apps) and multilingual support along with analytics.

Score out of 10

I'd give this app 9/10 - we've found a couple of small issues which have been flagged to be resolved but you'd need to be a developer to spot them.

As far as search and filter apps go in the app store this is our go-to app for search and filter. It's a decent & stable product which will work for just about any store & is well supported by the team at Boost Commerce.

At the end of the day - we only recommend apps that are stable and work reliably as many of our clients are at the enterprise end of the spectrum.

Ellie Ho

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Content Marketing Specialist

October 19, 2020

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5 min read

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How Custom Plugs use the Product Filter & Search App to improve Collection Filtering

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