Product Navigation Filters in a Web Store: Best Ideas

Product filters is one of the ways customers use to navigate products in an online store and an indispensable tool for convenient customer catalog browsing.



Product filtering by such traditional criteria as size, color, etc. just adds to the overall navigation usability but can hardly bring any sufficient competitive advantages.

Rather, you should consider adding some original filter attributes able to make your navigation unique, comfortable, and, this way, standing out of the trivial filtering patterns.

Today, we will determine how product filters can be originally implemented on the example of several e-commerce stores.

Filter by Feature

A few years ago, the H&M world clothing brand offered users the possibility to sort products in catalog by their distinct features. In fact, this filtering option suggested picking items according to a particular occasion: festival clothing, off-duty events, random occasions, etc.

After all, let’s agree that when we are looking for an item to dress on some occasion, sometimes, we just cannot be satisfied with only, say, color and size attributes. Rather, we need an item that fits not only our size and taste but also a particular purpose.

Another good example of filtering products by their features is the Hunter clothing store. Here, the brand placed focus on physical characteristics of particular items. This way, shoppers could sort, say, shoes by such features as:

• Waterproofing


• Water resistance


• Grip, etc.

Again, here the brand allowed shoppers to find the items that corresponded to their specific needs and not just to some general preferences.

Filter by Buying Behavior

Customer experience is one of the strongest motivators for other customers and prospects to make a purchase.

Imagine the situation in which you can evaluate how popular particular item groups are before considering buying something out of them. But what exact groups the items can be divided into?

For example, the AliExpress retail web store segments products in the catalog in the terms of their price range. More specifically, users can sort item groups by the percent of shoppers who made a purchase within the selected price range. This possibility allows customers to pick item groups more consciously in order to find a good value for money.

Filter by Rating

Another equally beneficial way to sort items in a retail web store is the possibility to discover the most rated products.

For example, you are looking for a jacket in a store. You’ve already picked the size, color, and even sub-category… and still, you are lost with the selection of dozens of items available yet. What will you do this in this case?

The Marks and Spencer famous retail web store dealt with this bottleneck by providing its shoppers with the possibility to sort items by their rating. More specifically, they could filter out the item categories that acquired the highest user approval.

As a result, users could make the best choice from the available selection by relying on the previous purchasers’ feedback.

Filter by Product Type

A few years ago, River Island, the UK clothing web store, introduced the possibility to sort items in the catalog by their types. For example, those shoppers who looked for t-shirts of a certain size and color might additionally view, say:

• Plain t-shirts


• Long-sleeve t-shirts


• Stripe t-shirts


• Vests, etc.

With such filtering option, customers could pick items with greater precision compared to the standard selection by category – in that case, the category is ‘t-shirt’. And, by narrowing down the selection of t-shirts in this way, shoppers saved time and effort finding exactly what they needed.

Lastly, we will explore the product filtering option by shipping service types.

Filter by Types of Shipping

Large retail web stores operating worldwide usually provide customers with the whole range of shipping services depending on their location.

In this case, it would be highly beneficial to sort items by provided shipping services. Amazon, for example, effectively deals with this issue by enabling shoppers to sort items by types of the shipping services provided.

The benefit of such move is just obvious - customers can avoid the confusion of ordering the products that cannot be shipped to their countries. In this case, they will always be presented with the selection of the items available in their region.

Bottom Line

The above examples show how online merchants can go beyond basic product filtering options in their stores.

Magento 2 store owners, in this case, can take advantage of our Layered Navigation extension. The module gives the possibility to create custom filters (in addition to the traditional ones) and add them to the navigation as filterable product attributes.

You can also view the Layered Navigation module in action to explore its features in details.