I’ve got the studio theme up and running. I’m using ‘collections’ as ‘categories’. Selling miniature furniture, my collections look like:
- Kitchen
- Dining Room
- Indoor Furniture
- Outdoor Furniture
and so forth. What I want is to have my main top menu allow the user to search by collection. Once they’ve chosen a collection, I’d like them to be able to sort in a more granular fashion.. Example: They choose ‘Kitchen’. Once those results populate with every item in the ‘Kitchen’ collection, I want them to be able to sort those results by item type.. for example, ‘bowls’, ‘glasses’, ‘table decor’, etc.
From reading the docs, it sounds like tags are sort of frowned on, so I’m trying to figure out how to categorize these items more specifically than collection, and after this, how to implement sorting features. I looked at the Meta Item section but it was very confusing.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Hi @tawnytim ,
The best way to go about this is using in-depth product filters. Once you land on a category’s page, and all the products from that category are present, the filter will let you narrow down the results further without leaving the page. See https://shopmonpetitchild.com/collections/outlet as an example. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the advice! Hey, I was searching for the term you mentioned “in-depth product filters” so I could educate myself better but I didn’t really find any documentation. Is this something you would code into the theme files or am I just missing something? You also mentioned categories but in my theme “studio”, it seems like collections=categories so I guess we’re just using the terms interchangeably. I have a pretty decent Wordpress background so categories is what I’m used to. Matter of fact, this shopify store is a port-in from a Wordpress site!
Anyhow, to my question about the in-depth product filters, if that comes already baked into some themes but not others, let me know because I’ll gladly grab a different one to avoid having to code(which I’m not amazing at).
Thanks!
Hey @tawnytim ,
Sorry about that. I think I got a little confusing with the terminology. I was referring to an “in-depth product filter” in a general sense meaning that you want a sidebar filter that has many different filtering options rather than just “filter by category”.
You are right when you say that collections and categories are the same thing. Thats just Shopify’s term for categories.
As for sidebar filter, I recommend getting something like this: https://apps.shopify.com/product-filter-and-search
You will need to update your products so that they feed into the filter correctly but, once you do, it should solve your issue and significantly improve the usability of your store.
Good luck!
Thanks! That clears it up. Cheers!
Regarding your question “in-depth product filters” without coding, you may want to try this filter app https://apps.shopify.com/ultimate-search-and-filter-1. The configuration is done in UI instead of coding and you dont need to hire an expert to set it up.