Filtering products can help improve your online sales conversion rate

Filtering products can help improve your online sales conversion rate

Online shops have traditionally used categories to group their products for customers, combined with a search facility so that customers can look for something specific. It has worked well, but there is an alternative that has been proven to boost sales conversions even more: product filters.

Product filters

You may have seen product filters on some of the big stores you have shopped on – particularly in fashion where you can tick boxes in a side or top menu to drill down into the product catalogue based on particular product features like colour, size or price. Customers can easily refine their search, viewing your products in a number of different ways to find what they want. It’s very efficient and can get customers from visiting to buying much quicker than traditional methods.

What makes this different from the category/search method is that customers can refine their searches by a number of different criteria and different product options at once, e.g., instead of searching through all the different size options and colour options, customer can see all t shirts that are sizes 8, 10 or 12 as well as being green or red, all at once. They can also adjust their search by taking all of the criteria they have defined and then applying a price criteria as well – for example all products between $20-$50. In an economy where shopping on a budget is prominent, this kind of tool can really help you help your customers. And when they feel helped, they’re much more likely to buy.

Filters take the functionality previously relegated to website advanced search but allow your product catalogue to be manipulated and searched based on the customer’s idea of how they want to look rather than the store owners. It saves huge amount of time cross referencing products in different categories as well.

Setting up filters are not difficult – they usually run on either the built in product fields that are defined for the product when it was set up, or predefined product features (like colour and size) or specifications that are attached to the product for the purpose of being searched.

Starting from version 3, in Ozcart administration panel you can set up product filters easily to automatically filter on any of the following:

  • Price range.
  • Stock availability (for example, showing in-stock products only).
  • The specific product features you have defined to your products (e.g., technical specs – colour, size, location, etc.).
  • Shipping (free shipping or paid shipping items).
  • Category (you can set up filters so that they only work in particular categories).

When you set up a filter the cart will give you a drop down box with all of the things that you can filter on – picking up any extra product fields that you have defined in your store (e.g. ISBN number for books) and any product features that you have defined for the specific purpose of searching.

When the filters are viewed on the front of your website, as items are chosen they automatically update the products shown. This is great for fashion retailers selling fashion or jewellery, those selling things like car or machine parts, music or downloadable product sellers (e.g., selling music in specific file formats or for product manuals),

Is this search method always a good idea?

There are times when this method is not a good idea for your store when there is not a large amount of variation of products in your store (or in a category in your store) and that filtering may not actually change the search results that much from search to search. Another time you might not want to use them is if there’s really just one main differentiating factor between products and that customers will find what they want better by being led down the path of having just one simple set of category choices to make.

In those circumstances, it’s best to turn off the filters for that category or for the shop because they potentially distract or confuse your customers from buying. Which is the opposite effect from what you want.

Overall

Overall filters can help improve the searching performance and conversion rate of your online store – which is why the department stores and large fashion retailers all use them. With Ozcart v3 and over, now you can too.

Ozcart Ecommerce

Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart. https://ozcart.com

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