Everything You Need to Know –

When it comes to making the ideal eCommerce site, it can be difficult to know what features you should and shouldn’t include for your customers. Of course, you want to make it user friendly, but it can be hard to decide what features help users and what features overwhelm users. Some top features used by eCommerce brands are filters and faceted search. But what’s the difference? And how do you know when to use one over the other? Understanding when to use filters and when to use a faceted search function can streamline your eCommerce site and encourage customers to want to return to your site for simple purchases.

What’s the Difference?

Both filters and facets help narrow down searches for users when they are navigating a site. In the case that your site includes many different products, having options for users to eliminate irrelevant criteria is ideal for a customer. By being able to customize their search to see what they only want to see makes it quick and simple for customers to purchase what they want. Without the ability to quickly find what they are looking for, oftentimes users leave sites and search on other sites that are more user friendly.

Filters are more general categories that help eliminate pages of products that users aren’t interested in. They don’t change even when search results are different, which is why it’s important to keep them general. Facets are more specific options that users can activate to help narrow down searches even more than general categories. The main difference is that with filters, you can only apply one at a time and it doesn’t change. In a faceted search, you can apply many facets at one time to create your own customized category that eliminates all other results that don’t match the criteria you chose. When there is a high volume of pages, a faceted search helps users easily search for what they are specifically looking for. In some cases, sites are using both filters and facets to give users a more defined search without spending all their time looking for the content they desire.

Why Should I Use Filters For My Site?

The benefit of having filters is that having more broad categories allows customers to see products they might be interested in that they didn’t think about before. For example, a user might be looking for black shoes, but in the broad category of “shoes” they come across a pair of white shoes they like and might also purchase them along with the black pair. It can also be cheaper to apply filters to your website because they are not as specific as facets, which require more resources to create and continuously maintain. The negative side of using filters is that they are general categories that have no customizing features for users. If your site offers several hundred pairs of shoes, then a filter for shoes would still leave users with an exhausting amount of content pages. However, filters work if the majority of your products can be lumped into general categories and still help customers narrow down search results.