What is Faceted Search and Best Practices for eCommerce Sites

June 17, 2024

June 25, 2021

•

7 min read

Who has enough time to check all 2,604 pairs of shoes? Every time visitors land on your site, they want accurate search results instantly, although they will never make perfect searches. That’s why your search algorithm must be good enough to help them out. To improve your site performance as well as not waste shoppers’ time with your e-store, using filters is the most basic way to provide this on any site. In today’s article, we will talk about faceted search - a method that creates a user-friendly interface for any product discovery.

What is Faceted Search?

Faceted search or facet navigation provides customers with a smart and logical interface to narrow the available lists based on their preferred criteria (also called facets). In other words, this structure helps consumers refine search results to get their desired products easily by selecting the facet options.

Faceted search in Alphalete, one of the premium customers of Boost AI Search & Discovery

It's like having multiple filters to narrow down your choices. Instead of scrolling through endless pages, you can select filters for things like:

Color: Red, blue, green, etc.
Size: 8, 9, 10, etc.

You can choose several filters at once. So, if you want red, size 8 running shoes under $100, you can select all those filters, and only shoes matching all those criteria will show up.

The word "faceted" refers to the different aspects or "facets" of a product that you can filter by. Each filter is a facet.

How Does Faceted Search Work?

Faceted navigation offers shoppers a chance to play with filters smartly. It uses the metadata of your products - for example, product type, SKU, title, and tags, so customers can easily find what they need with a few clicks.

An example of the facet navigation by Shop SM. (Source: ShopSM)

Let's say you would love to buy some men's shoes. You stumble upon ShopSM and type in the keyword ‘shoes’ in the search box. Over 2,600 results for shoes show up - which is overwhelming. Luckily, you spot that you can drill down your results with the various facets on the left. Instead of browsing through thousands of shoes, you now easily find out your favorite ones based on vendors, colors, and prices.

You might also want to check out:How Custom Plugs Use the Product Filter & Search App to Improve Collection Filtering

What is the Difference Between Filter and Faceted Search?

Anything that analyzes a set of content and excludes unmatched items we call ‘filter’ while faceted navigation consists of filters describing a group of content in detail. (Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

The terms "faceted search" and "filters" are often used interchangeably, as both sift through large amounts of data to show only relevant items.

However, faceted search distinguishes itself by offering multiple filters simultaneously, each representing a different product attribute. Traditional filtering on collection pages often limited users to single selections, frustrating shoppers with varied preferences. While many filtering apps now allow multiple selections, only advanced solutions like Boost AI Search & Discovery offer sophisticated filtering across both collection and search result pages.

In short, filters are helpful for primary navigation; faceted search empowers shoppers to refine their selections more precisely.

Key Features of Faceted Search in Shopify

Faceted search powered by Boost AI Search & Discovery on Alphalete store.

Dynamic Filtering Options

Shopify faceted search offers a wide array of dynamic filtering options, providing a powerful tool for customers to refine their search results in real time. These options include:

Price: Filter products within specific price ranges, allowing customers to find items within their budget easily.
Availability: Show only in-stock items, preventing frustration from clicking on out-of-stock products.
Brand: Filter by specific brands, catering to customers with brand loyalty or preferences.
Size: Essential for apparel, shoes, and other size-specific products, allowing customers to find the correct size quickly.
Color: A highly popular filter, allowing customers to browse products by color preference.
Customer Reviews: Filter products by star rating, leveraging social proof to guide purchasing decisions.

The dynamic nature of these filters means the available options adjust instantly as users interact with the search. For example, selecting a specific brand might reduce the available color options, reflecting the actual inventory.

Storefront vs. Tag Filtering

Shopify offers built-in storefront filtering with basic filtering options based on product properties already defined within Shopify. It's easy to set up but might lack the flexibility of custom tag filtering.

Custom Tag Filtering allows for more granular control, enabling merchants to create custom tags and use them for filtering. This offers greater flexibility but requires more upfront setup and management. This is particularly useful for implementing sophisticated Shopify search filters for eCommerce.

The best approach depends on your store's complexity and needs. Simple stores might find storefront filtering sufficient, while larger stores with many products and specific categorization needs will benefit from custom tag filtering. Consider your product filtering options and choose the method that best suits your Shopify filtered navigation needs.

Category-Specific Filters

Implementing category-specific filters is crucial for enhancing the user experience. Instead of showing all possible filters regardless of the product category, category-specific filters display only relevant options for the current search context. For instance, a filter for "screen size" might only appear when browsing televisions, while a filter for "fabric type" might only appear when browsing clothing.

This is a significant advantage of Boost AI Search & Discovery. You can easily create dedicated custom filter sets for each collection. This ensures shoppers only see relevant filter options, streamlining their browsing experience.

Top Benefits of Faceted Search for eCommerce Stores

A study indicated that 27% of shopping session failures are results of not being able to find the right products on the site, which means business owners lose one-third of potential sales. Take a look at the key advantages that this method could help your site with.

Increasing product findability: Facet is a smart way to refine results from search queries, especially for shoppers who do not have a specific item in mind. The reason is that facet outlines several attributes that customers might like to consider adding to their interests.
Enhancing customer experience: Simplifying the customer journey from searching to purchasing will delight consumers, aside from boosting conversions and sales. Faceted search displays a list of sub-sections (called “facets”) that sort their options instead of guessing from the catalog descriptions.
Providing Valuable Data: Faceted filter is encompassing as it provides shoppers with multiple options to drill down into their preferred items. Each step reveals more details about the products they are interested in, so store owners can take advantage of the insights to maximize sales.
Reducing No Result Search: Thanks to the ability to configure search results to show facets with results, you can be confident that shoppers will not find themselves in a situation with no products available.

With faceted search, customers do not have to scroll through catalog pages and look at never-ending product lists just to find a desirable one. Hence, your site navigation becomes considerably more convenient.

How to Implement Faceted Search on Shopify

Using Shopify’s Native Features

As mentioned above, Shopify has a native app providing a basic faceted search functionality called Shopify Search & Discovery. To get started, you just need to install the app and follow the instructions here.

A useful enhancement for any filtering app is the Merge value or Group value feature. It helps you declutter product filtering options by combining similar values. For example, “light blue” and “dark blue” can be referred to as only one “blue” value in the filter tree.

Installing Third-Party Apps for Advanced Features

Boost AI Search & Discovery is a perfect app to implement faceted search on Shopify stores.

For advanced faceted search capabilities, consider installing a third-party app. Many apps offer features beyond Shopify product filtering, such as adding a tooltip or a search bar within the filter.

Boost is one of those. This app offers every filtering capability you can imagine, including the ability to create custom filter trees for each collection, plus Personalized search, AI/ML recommendation, Product bundles, and integration with other marketing tools.

Customization and Coding Options

For highly customized faceted search functionality, you can leverage Shopify Liquid code or hire a developer. This approach offers the greatest flexibility but requires significant technical expertise. With a strong understanding of Liquid, you can customize the display and behavior of your filters.

Hiring a developer is the most straightforward approach if you lack the necessary coding skills. A developer can create a custom faceted search solution tailored to your specific needs, integrating seamlessly with your existing theme and other functionalities. However, this is the most expensive option but provides the most control and flexibility.

Best Practices of Faceted Search with Examples

The goal of faceted navigation is to improve the shopping experience by allowing shoppers to locate their preferred products within milliseconds. Consumers can know exactly where they end up with their selected filter options. Therefore, e-merchants can maximize the chances of conversions and speed up customers' buying decisions. Here are 4 key tactics for you to make the most of faceted search.

Offer The Most Basic Filter Types

Most facets are placed as filters, and some of them are more widely used than others. According to Baymard, the top 5 essential filter types that should be available in most eCommerce stores are:

Price

80% of online customers try to filter product lists by price. They usually have an idea of a suitable budget for their purchases. Whether customers apply a Price filter first or after tailoring the product list with other filters, most will only want to consider affordable items.

An example of a price filter from Clarks. (Source: Clarks)

In this example, Clarks provides a price filter that consists of price range options and linear range sliders for their consumers to define their price.

Brand

Many shoppers are brand-conscious and tend to seek out well-known names when drowning in products they have never experienced, especially in the cosmetics and apparel industry.

Nordstrom allows buyers to find their favorite brands instead of looking at over 4,500 items. Such a relief when you have a brand facet (Source: Nordstrom)

On the other hand, a brand filter might be irrelevant for single-brand sites. In this case, you should consider adding a sub-brand filter that allows shoppers to filter by product types or distinctive product features.

An example of Dermalogica applying a useful filter for “Product system”(Source: Dermalogica)

Dermalogica is an example of a single-brand site applying product-based filters. When visitors search for moisturizers, they can quickly narrow down the results by choosing a product system - like active clearing, age smart, or ultra calming - that meets their needs.

User Ratings

In a recent study, 45% of participants said that users' reviews and ratings are one of the primary reasons for online shopping. Surprisingly, 53% of online stores do not let customers filter product lists by ratings.

In fact, many consumers do not feel comfortable making assessments by themselves, so they rely on ratings as a surrogate for excellent quality or value for money. As a result, when they are unsure which products are appropriate, they want to use other customers’ ratings to filter out bad products.

Thanks to the review ratings, shoppers with little knowledge of your products will not struggle to identify the ones that meet their preferences. (Source: Equal Exchange)

Size

Size is an important attribute for many industries, as customers can quickly exclude unsuitable items to focus on variants that match their demands. For some product types, size filters might be replaced by filters for different dimensions, such as width and height. These filters would be especially common where the products have to fit into a specific space, such as kitchen appliances.

Golden Nile uses a Size filter to make their customers’ online shopping much easier. (Source: Golden Nile)

Golden Nile's main products are hand-knotted rugs. To create a convenient shopping experience, the brand set up a size filter, apart from the information by the product title. As a result, buyers will get a clear picture of how it will fit in their room of choice.

Color

Needless to say, color seems to be the most popular product variation. Countless customers, of course, have strong preferences for specific colors and would never consider goods in other shades.

Without a color filter, getting a product in the colors that a customer is interested in purchasing would be impossible, and the lists would be cluttered with items in unwanted shades.

Never let your customers feel disappointed because your site lacks a usual facet like colors. Instead, you should enable them to limit the number of products displayed to their biases. (Source: Paperandmore)

Allow Multiple Selections

Allowing customers to select several filter option values at once is a smart idea as they can save tons of time re-loading the browser and website. For instance, someone might be searching for clothing in various colors but only want to see items in a specific size. This functionality helps online shoppers generate a tailored catalog based on their unique criteria. Therefore, they can browse the most relevant clothes available and choose from a few final options (rather than thousands), significantly improving the consumer experience.

Use Thematic Filters

Did you know that 46% of eCommerce stores do not offer thematic filters?

These are filters that bring together a variety of unrelated products. ‘Seasonal specials’, "best value," and "casual style" are just a few examples of filters that might contain products from all categories with a variety of unique qualities.

‘Stock Status’ is the category that informs your customers which products are still available so that they will not get frustrated to pick an out-of-stock item. (Source: Headphone Zone)

Applying thematic filters might be time-consuming. However, the extra time it takes to develop your filters, the more value you will get. Done right, they might encourage visitors to buy additional items, increasing your average order size.

Make Use of Consumers’ Language

Many stores make the mistake of using made-up names, overly complicated terms, or jargon, like filters. You might come up with a bright name for a line of summer dresses or a certain sort of garment, but your buyers are not looking for it. And if they are, a simple search query will lead them to the product instead of applying filters.

Think like a customer to see what aspects of your products they would care about before you name a filter. (Source: Urban Natural Home)

Always ensure that the words and phrases you use genuinely help your customers find what they are seeking. Take a look at the top search queries on your site, read comments, and ask your sales team whether they have any insight into the language customers use. Also, don't forget to use a powerful tool called site search analytics to increase sales with better search and navigation.

Faceted Search and SEO

Faceted search can create some on-page issues for SEO, although it is a useful tool for consumers. A filter is used to sort or narrow the content of a page, which often creates either duplicated content or additional URLs that add no value. Hence, you should make sure that Google will not crawl internal facet links.

Here are some tactics to implement faceted search without wrecking your site rankings on SERPs.

No-index

You can use the no-index tags to tell Google bots which pages should not be included in the index. Although this strategy will remove pages from the index, the crawl budget will still be spent on them, and link equity will be eroded. To prevent search engines from indexing those pages, you need to add the following no-index tag to the <head> section of each page:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Canonicalization

Canonical tag or rel="canonical" is a popular approach to avoid Google penalizing your site for duplicating content. The one containing the canonical tag will be considered preferable and/or the original version in a set of identical or similar pages. This informs search engines that you are not attempting to cheat the system. See the code sample below to know the syntax.

The rel="canonical" in action. It indicates that this page should be treated as duplicated content of the specified URL. (Source: MozBar)

AJAX

Once you apply faceted search on your site, AJAX implementation will help you inhibit the creation of new URLs when customers apply filters.

(Source: MozBar)

Your site is using the AJAX layer to manage communications with the web server. Imagine that you have a set of 5 pages, and consumers visit the first one on their device and request to change the sort order. Then, Ajax will execute the action without redrawing the entire page or changing the URL.

However, keep in mind that you can apply this solution on a new site only.

Robots.txt Disallow

This means you will disallow crawlable URLs for sort orders, filters, and facets. Robots.txt is a simple text file that is stored in the root directory of your site. Although URL patterns of eCommerce sites greatly differ, here are some common examples:

Disallow: *?sort=*
Disallow: *&sort=*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*

The file should exist at /robots.txt (off the root domain). In fact, bots can choose whether to follow your instructions or not. While Bingbots and Google bots generally obey your rules, Malicious bots don’t. To learn how to set up robots.txt files, please visit Google's developer documentation.

You might be asking which one is the ideal setup. Well, it is essential to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Thus, you will probably need to implement all of them to create a healthy site for happy consumers and efficient bots.

Final Thoughts

eCommerce platforms like Shopify do not provide merchants with faceted search, so a third-party solution is necessary. Facets could be an extra cost to design and maintenance, but honestly, they are worth every penny. If you are looking for an app that brings your store to the next level, Boost Product Filter & Search will be the right choice. The app offers:

Vertical & horizontal filter menu.
Advanced and customizable filters for collection and search result pages.
Dynamic filters by price, product type, collections, tags, vendor, color, size, product rating, and availability.
Multi-select filters; filters by tags & metafields.
Consistent brand style on all screen sizes and compatible with popular Shopify themes.

Want to explore your chances with Boost Commerce? Validate your business idea, and you will get a 14-day trial period to experience the game-changing Shopify product filter and smart search app.

Cici Nguyen

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Email Marketing Specialist

June 25, 2021

•

7 min read

What is Faceted Search and Best Practices for eCommerce Sites

Shopping shouldn’t feel like a chore

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