Introduction

If you're new to using the Citrus-Lime Cloud MT e-commerce platform and about to make a start on setting up your online store, one of the very first tasks you'll need to approach is deciding how you would like your navigation structure to work.

The decisions you make now will form the foundations of how customers will browse your online store.  Being competitive on price and having good stock availability will not be an advantage if your customers can't easily find the product they plan to purchase.

The Find & Filter concept used on the Cloud MT platform enables you to provide your online customers with the ability to start with their initial purchase requirements and easily navigate your site to locate the product or products they're interested in.

Think about how customers might start with different purchase requirements when they're shopping online:

• Customer 1:  "I'd like an orange-coloured waterproof jacket."
• Customer 2:  "I'm looking for a women's jacket made by X brand."
• Customer 3:  "I need a new jacket for when I go hill walking."

Each of these different requirements might all be fulfilled by the same product, but each customer is starting with a different idea of what they want to buy.

When set up well, the Find & Filter navigation will allow each customer to take their initial thought and work their way through your online store to the product that meets their needs.

This article will explain the different elements of setting up your Find & Filter navigation and how each aspect plays a part in the overall picture.

Terminology

Before we go any further, it's worth explaining what we mean by some of the terms that will be used throughout this article:

Facet - any definable aspects that make up a particular item; in this context, Facets are a way to assign items in your store with a range of both similar and unique attributes. 

Activity - the common things that customers might do with the items that you sell; the intended purpose of the items;

Department - how you would classify the items you sell into broad groups of similar products;

Product Group - a more specific group of items within a department; think of this as similar to Categories in Cloud POS;

Materials - the key material that makes up the product, i.e., carbon, leather, titanium;

Browse Filters - a way of defining the characteristics or features of items, that will help your customers to pinpoint the type of product they are seeking.

Planning

Setting up Your Find & Filter Navigation is not something you will want to change frequently, without careful consideration or support and advice from the Citrus-Lime Team.

This being the case, we highly recommend that once you've read this guide, you plan on paper before committing anything digitally.  This will allow you to visualise the structure and help ensure that it will work the way you intend.

Keep in mind that it is easier to add more information at a later stage than it is to remove it!

You may find it helpful to print out some copies of the following template and populate the different fields with facets that describe some example products, to get an idea of how the different facets contribute to the navigation:

FAF-Item-Planner.bmp

How Facets relate to products

Fixed Facets

There are 4 x Fixed Facet features that are required to achieve a basic setup for Facet Navigation and Facet Filtering.  These are :

• Activity Types
  Example:  An outdoor pursuits retailer might create activity types for Rock Climbing, Trail Running, Hiking, etc.
  
   
• Departments
  Example:  A clothing retailer might create departments such as Accessories, Footwear, Headwear, Jackets, Shorts, Tops, Trousers.
  
   
• Product Groups
  Example:  If one of your departments is 'Footwear', then you may have products groups such as 'Trainers', 'Boots', 'Shoes', etc.
  
   
• Materials
  Example:  A cycle retailer may create materials such as 'Carbon', 'Titanium', 'Aluminium', 'Steel', etc, to represent the materials from which bike frames can be made.

Additional Facet Options

Each individual Product Record in Cloud MT has additional Facets to apply which help make a product even more easily found by your customers. The additional Facets are:

• Season
  This information is taken from the Product Record in Cloud POS.
  
   
• Gender
  This is limited to Google Definitions of Male, Female, and Unisex.
  
   
• Colour
  Limited to the Google Definitions of Beige, Black, Blue, Brown, Clear, Gold, Green, Grey, Orange, Pink, Purple, Red, Silver, White, and Yellow.
  
   
• Age Group
  Limited to the Google Definitions of Adult, and Child.

We can see from the example below, how these Find & Filter options can be applied to a product record in Cloud MT:

Browse Filters

You can create 3 x Department Browse Filters for every Department you create, and 3 x Product Group Browse Filters for every Product Group you create.

How do these types of browse filters differ?

• Department Browse Filters are used to filter a Department based on attributes that are not unique to a particular Product Group;
• Product Group Browse Filters are used to further filter a Product Group based on attributes that are unique to a particular Product Group.
  
   

To put this into a real-world context, a bicycle retailer might create a Department called 'Bikes' with a Department Browse Filter of 'Wheel Size', because bikes intended for different purposes can have different diameter wheels, but equally, wheel diameter is not unique to a particular type of bike.  This way, the department browse filter can be applied to as many product groups as necessary.

A clothing retailer might set up a Product Group called 'Boots' with Product Group Browse Filters such as 'Mid Ankle', 'Above Ankle', 'Calf Length'.  These are attributes that are unique to Boots and so will not be applied to other product groups.

Are Fixed Facets related to each other?

The short answer is no.  Whilst one might assume that they are related, in a technical sense they have no relationship with each other; there is no hierarchy.

Consider the following:

At first look, it would appear that there is an obvious relationship between each of these Fixed Facets.  However, they are not related at all in a technical sense.  This helps to deliver the most flexibility in filter options to the site user.

With those example options, a customer can filter to any combination of the four Fixed Facets.  Want to look at 'all carbon bikes'?  Just apply the Department and Material filters.  Want to look at 'all mountain bikes with full suspension'?  Apply the Activity Type and Product Group filters.

Are Browser Filters related to their Fixed Facet 'parent'?

Yes - unlike Fixed Facets, Browse Filters are directly related to the Fixed Facet they are created against.

Browse Filters are perhaps the area where you'll need to give the most careful consideration in terms of your planning, to ensure that you're not unintentionally restricting the results a site user can find.

This is because products can only be associated with one option within each unique Fixed Facet or Browse Filter Option.

Going back to the example we gave earlier about wheel diameters, if you wanted your site users to be able to find all bikes with 27.5 inch diameter wheels, you would need to create 'Wheel Size' as a Browse Filter for the Department 'Bikes'.

If you were to create the 'Wheel Size' browse filter at Product Group level, for example, 'Full Suspension', this would restrict the results to only that product group.  You would only see full suspension bikes with 27.5 inch wheels with this option in place.

Okay, let's see an example...

A good way to visualise the set-up would be to look at a very basic example with an individual item.  

To some extent, we are working backwards, in that for the purposes of this example we are designing our navigation to suit a particular item.  You would generally create your navigation first and then assign your Find & Filter options to the item.

However, this example illustrates how you need to consider at each stage how the navigation you create will be applicable to all the items you plan to activate on your e-commerce site.

We’re going to set up a pair of black, waterproof, full finger mountain biking gloves:

Whilst there are various types of cycling, to keep this as a simple example, we'll assume that our e-commerce site is aimed only at road cyclists and mountain bikers.

In Cloud MT, we navigate to the Find & Filter Set-up page:  https://cloudmt.citruslime.com/#/filters

Under the section Set-up Activity Types, we can add our two activities by clicking the Add New Activity button:

This covers the two types of activity that we anticipate will interest our customers.

Next, we need to Set-up Departments, and any department Browse Filters we would like to add.  It's logical that Gloves would be considered as clothing, so we can add Clothing as our department:

We've also added a Browse Filter called 'Clothing Protection'.  Within this Browse Filter, we have added some Facets to describe the various properties that different items of clothing might provide.

Notice that these Facets are not specific to gloves, but can be applied to various other items of clothing too.  By creating these as Department Browse Filters rather than Product Group Browse Filters, we can therefore apply these Facets to anything we add to the 'Clothing' Department.  We are not limiting our options by making these specific to gloves.

The next stage is to create a Product Group, so that our filter options will allow site users to pick out 'gloves' from our wider Clothing selection.

At this level, we might add some Browse Filters that are specific to gloves, to allow our site users to employ the filters to locate gloves with particular attributes or properties.

In this example, we've added two separate Browse Filters, 'Glove Type' and 'Glove Padding':

We can be confident in creating these Facets at Product Group level, as we know we're not going to need to apply the 'Full Finger' facet, for example, to anything other than gloves.

Finally, we could set up a Material Type.  In this situation, our gloves are made of mixed material rather than one specific material.  Equally, our knowledge of our market means we know that they tend not to be too concerned with the actual material used to make the gloves, and more interested in the properties of the gloves.

If our gloves featured a material that could be considered a potential selling point and something our site users might search for, such as a brand name fabric (Gore-Tex, or Windstopper, for example), then we might consider it more important to set up a material type.  

In this instance, we have already created Department Browse Filters which can be used to filter for the properties of clothing (Thermal / Windproof / Water Resistant / Waterproof), so with this in mind, we'll skip the material type.

This raises a really important point to note; just because there is the scope to set up numerous Find & Filter options, it doesn't mean you have to.  Think carefully at each stage about the value you will add to the overall navigation.  It is far easier to start simple and add to the options as you begin to identify areas where they can be developed.

With our options set up, we can now move to the product and assign the Find & Filter Options.

When we arrive at the product record in Cloud MT, there are already some Find & Filter Options set.  These have been brought across from the item record in Cloud POS, and are not editable in Cloud MT.  If we spot any inaccuracies, we would need to update the item in Cloud POS, and that will in turn update the information in Cloud MT.

Clicking on the View and Edit All Assigned Find & Filter Options and Collections button will open a pop-up window, in which we can assign our options:

We can now work our way through each of the dropdowns, selecting the appropriate options for our product:

Once we've saved this information, we'll see the product record updates as below:

So, what does this look like on the customer-facing side of the e-commerce site?

Filter options will only appear if there is a product set with those options.  This means you're not presenting the site user with filters that won't find a product.  There would be no point in giving the option to filter for purple gloves, for example, if purple gloves are not available.

As we only have one item set up in our example, this is how our filters appear on the front end of the site:

Let's see what happens to the Filters when we set up a second item, which has some different filter options set:

We can see how activating a second product with different attributes increases the Find & Filter options displayed to site users:

Key points to take away

 

• Plan on paper before you commit anything electronically;
  
   
• Although you can add multiple filter options, this doesn't mean that you must;
  
   
• It's better to start simple and add more options as you identify the need for them.
  
   
• If you are using AutoSIM to activate products, then you should not amend the Find & Filter structure that is already in Cloud MT by default.