Owners of Woocommerce stores with a wide range of products facing with the problem of choosing a filter for an online store. It’s good if you thought about it at the stage of store development. Before there was invested an amount of money, goods were downloaded, all this chaos was provided to potential customers, and they got tired of looking for the thing they needed in your store and left the website. This is what a third of Internet shop users do without filters or with an incorrectly configured filter.
So how should be the filter in an online store look like? It’s not just a search for products. He should help customers and store owners easily and quickly find the product they want. Show the assortment in all its variety. This will increase the number of sales. A well-tuned filter will be the gateway to the internet shop into the world of high sales and loyal customers. Indeed, according to statistics, the presence of a filter in the catalog reduces the number of refusals. This means that the interest of users is increasing and the indexing of the website in search systems is growing.
It is not that difficult to create and configure a Product FIlter. (Check out our detailed documentation to learn how to customize each individual filter, options in general, as well as to make a unique design for your filter.)
In this article, we will show you how to prevent conversions from leaving you, or how to correctly configure the product filter of the Woocommerce store using the example of the plugin WooCommerce Product Filter By WooBeWoo
Most common filter problems and how to fix them
Let’s take a closer look at the problems faced by the owners of online stores, but few people think about them and tell you how to fix it
- The button ” filter” should be found on the page.
It is quite obvious that this action button should always be in the visitor’s sight. This rule must be followed even if the filter itself contains many parameters and takes up more than one screen. In general, all action buttons should be clearly visible and as accessible as possible
How to fix it?
The WooCommerce Product Filter plugin provides an option for it: you can select the locations of absolutely all buttons. To do this, go to settings-> buttons and change the “button position” option.
Advice:
Use Auto Filtering and Ajax Search to ensure that clients receive filtering results instantly by clicking on the desired filtering option.
- Ability to reset some parameters separately
Often, developers forget about the need to provide the visitor with the ability to reset only part of the criteria, placing only the “reset filter” button. In the design of online stores with a large offer of products and when using multiple filters for the selection of products, to improve convenience, you should put the filtering criteria selected by the visitor on a separate panel with a characteristic cross to cancel the accounting of this parameter.
How to fix it?
Turn on advanced option “Display selected parameters of filters”.
Advice: also enable the Display “Clear All” option to be able to delete one by one or all selected parameters.
- Zero filtering result or the appearance of the message “Nothing was found for your request”
There is nothing worse for a visitor who chooses and fills in the search criteria than getting irrelevant or zero results. Therefore, if the value “0” is returned by any filtering criterion, then it should be excluded from the list of product characteristics available for selection in the filters of websites, or rendered as inactive following the design. The lack of products required by the visitor, even with a diverse range of online stores, always negatively affects his degree of satisfaction.
How to fix it?
Enable option “Show parameters without products as disabled”, for that go to options->content.
Advice: in a pinch, set a beautiful text that customers will see if nothing will be founded on their request. To do that, go to Options -> Content and set the text in the field “Set no products found the text”
- Coordination of multi-selection settings.
The question lies in the use of logical operators “OR” / “AND”. It is necessary to check how the filter of the selection of commodity items in the online store functions when the visitor simultaneously selects “red” T-shirts of size “S” – either only all the “red” T-shirts of size “S” will be shown, or all “red” of all sizes, or all sizes “S” in any color.
How to fix it?
In most cases, it preferably displays the exact result of filtering goods, which is especially important for online stores with a large assortment, that is, only “red” size “S”. This option demonstrates the maximum customer satisfaction rate. But the use of the second option also takes place if the expediency of such an algorithm for the filter operation is due to the specifics of the product or other features of the site.
You can configure this option both in the filter settings and globally by going to Options -> Content and setting the desired value for the Multiple categories’ logic option.
- Inconsistency of the attribute with its presentation to the user.
For sure, a lot of people have thought about how exactly to display this or that attribute, because they all radically differ depending on the direction of your store, be it the color of the car or the size of new sneakers.
And many stores display this as just a list that your potential buyer may well not notice.
How to fix it?
WooBeWoo has taken a very painstaking approach to attribute mapping, and in this product filter plugin you can use nine different ways, such as:
Checkbox list; Radio Buttons list; Dropdown; Multiple Dropdown; Colors; Text; Buttons; Switch; Slider.
With such capabilities, it is not difficult to guess how exactly it is more logical to use the display of an attribute filter, for example, Color – to display color attributes, or Slider to display a range of Hoodie size options and other things.
Advice: also, the Woocommerce product filter is ACF compliant and fully compatible with CPT UI plugins, and you can use attribute filter to sort custom taxonomies by simply creating a taxonomy in the above plugins and it will appear in the attribute selection in the attribute filter.
- Lack of progress indicator.
An immediate response is undoubtedly the best option for any application, but sometimes it is not possible. (Slow performance of the system may be due to a weak Internet connection, or the operation itself may be complex and time-consuming.) In such cases, in order to reduce the load on the user, you must confirm to the user that the system is working properly, busy working on his task and that there is real progress.
How to fix it?
Users want to control the system they are using. “Loader” is one of the most popular forms of providing system status to the user.
Fortunately, Woocommerce Product Filter plunged into solving this problem more than head-on – to brighten up customer expectations, a whole section of options is highlighted here. Go to Options-> Loader and completely customize your Loader and Overlay
Advice:
This plugin can upload your own Loader, download it, and while waiting, your customer will see an additional advertisement of your brand, logo, or other.
Here is an example of a WooBeWoo loader, can you agree that it is better to look at this more than at an unknown symbol?
- You cannot select multiple options at once.
Most product filters work on the principle of one choice = one filtering. And according to user polls, this drawback is that they are most enraged while choosing a product because they constantly have to come back and choose again.
But this is the main task of the product filter – the filter must lead the buyer to the product he needs, alternately choosing the necessary criteria, and superimposing them on each other. And as a result, here they are the best purchase candidates.
How to fix it?
Woocommerce Product Filter has a very useful option like multiple choice both in the dropdown list and in the checkbox list.
Let’s show an example of a category filter:
Go to the category filter editing and select the option you need in the Show on frontend as an option.
Advice: We also recommend that you configure the Show hierarchical option to more accurately display the filtering of parent and child categories.
- Long filter length.
Many users experience the inconvenience of working with large filters because store organizers often make filters for absolutely all available parameters.
How to fix it?
Several points can be applied here:
1) Firstly, you can set the length of the blocks and the length of the filter itself in the settings.
2) Secondly, do not add all filters at once, think over your concept, and approach the question from the buyer’s side. by what parameters you could search for this or that product yourself. And based on this, add the filters your store needs. For example, if you sell an endless product (guitar lessons, etc.) then you will hardly need a filter “by Stock Status”.
3) Use the Show More (full list) option. Sometimes there are too many categories, and the display of the full list will look unaesthetic. To enable it, go to Options-> Content and enable Display “Show more” and, if you wish, select the Full List option to open the full list, not the scrollbar.
Conclusion
Of course, the need to use feature filters in Woocommerce is undeniable. And the nuances of their development are primarily determined by the concept of the website, its purpose, assortment, and design. If they are needed, it is imperative to take into account every little thing in setting them up, think over every possible path of the client to the product he needs. To do this, the WooCommerce Product Filter By WooBeWoo plugin has filters for absolutely any product search parameter. And the correct organization of options and product filter design will significantly increase the satisfaction of potential buyers and significantly reduce the conversion path. Good luck and never hesitate to make mistakes, because those who do nothing ever make mistakes.