Adding an alphabetical filter

Store Design

Topic summary

Goal: add alphabetical (A–C, D–F, etc.) and mature plant size (mini, small, medium, large, giant) filters to a large product catalog.

Context: Shopify store for a hosta nursery, ~900 varieties. Migrating to Xtra 5.1.0 with the Xtra theme; site is locked during setup and bilingual content work. Shopify Search & Discovery app is installed.

Progress: Flower color and leaf color filters are already working.

Proposal shared: Create a custom alphabetical filter in Search & Discovery by using either product tags or a custom metafield to store the first letter of each product title, add the letter to each product, then configure the filter to use these values.

Current blocker: The store owner added letter tags but is confused in the Search & Discovery app about which “source” to select when creating the filter.

Gaps: No explicit instructions yet for the mature size filter. The thread lacks clarification on whether to use tags vs. metafields as the filter source.

Status: Ongoing and unresolved; awaiting concrete steps on selecting the filter source and implementing the size-based filter.

Summarized with AI on December 13. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi Folks,

Newbie to setting up a website and need some advice on how to add a couple filters to my products to give my customers a great experience. We own a garden nursery specializing in a single variety of perennial. I’ve been able to set up the filter for the flower colour of each variety as well as the filter for the leaf colour (and combination of colours). However, I’m struggling to figure out how to offer a filter for the customer to search all products alphabetically (A-C, D-F etc.) as well as by the Nursery Association’s mature plant size listings (mini, small, medium, large and giant). We will have about 900 varieties on offer in the next year so we really need a customer to be able to filter easily on multiple levels so as to narrow things down significantly. We are currently moving from ‘Trade’ to ‘Xtra’ 5.1.0 and have locked our site during the switch as I need the time to add products and translate the English as we are a bilingual site. We have purchased the ‘Xtra’ theme and have switched over to it. We also have the Shopify’s Search and discovery app up and running. A site that I’m inspiring to look like is www.nhhostas.com . Any help or hints would be greatly appreciated.

1 Like
2

You can create a custom filter based on product titles using Shopify’s Search & Discovery app.

  • Use tags or a custom metafield for the first letter of the product title (A, B, C, etc.).
  • Add these tags to each product.
  • Then, you can configure the filter to show products by these tags.
3

I’m so confused at this point :thinking: I have letter tags on my products but am in
Search and Discovery App and I’m lost as I don’t understand what “source”
to use. I’m sure it’s try simple but I’m just not seeing what I need to
do. Glenn