Thread: Need to drill down for products

I have set up my store mostly using departments. When I choose a department, then a sub of that department I get the products listed that I want, however at that point I need to further filter by being able to click on a manfacture and have the previously selected department and sub-department filters stay active. If I choose a manufacture now, I get all products for the manufacture in all departments. Any help would be appreciated.

If you examine the page.searchadv.xml.config and searchadv.aspx pages and you will have some idea of the means to perform this. If you adapted things from those files and replaced the drop-down list inputs of the search form and made them hidden form fields generated in response to the users drill-down, then I think you would be on the right track for producing your desired effect.

You could add this using cross-entity filtering feature which is supported, but you may also want to check out some of the cool add-ons for dynamic product filtering done by Vortx.com. they are very slick, and may provide a much nicer incremental DYNAMIC product selection process (typically in left side bar) to help customers easily change filter options on many areas and see resulting products. It's actually slicker than using cross-entity filtering, which needs a post back to do, etc. Vortx is one of our Platinum DevNet partners http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-devnet.aspx

Thanks for mentioning our 'filtering' navigation system, guys!

At Vortx we frequently work with "Reductive Navigation" which sounds like the navigation structure that you have described - a way to narrow the results based upon chosen categories and/or characteristics. Reductive Navigation works like this:

As someone moves through your site, they can choose to narrow their visible results by certain characteristics. For an example of this, visit one of the sites that we did with reductive navigation (and accordion movement characteristics): Today's Gentleman. As you make a choice from the left navigation menu, it narrows the selection of what you can see and 'hides' the other products.

As you see in that example, you can choose to view designer, orange, striped ties by clicking those three categories. All of the ties that do not match those chosen categories are filtered and are not visible or hidden.

Is this what you are looking for?

Reductive Navigation works very well in circumstances where there are a large quantity of products that are similar with a few defining characteristics (as with the colors and patterns of the ties). In these situations, Reductive Navigation effectively narrows the possibilities for a customer to quickly find what they are looking for - amongst many options.

If you would like more information about navigation structures, please visit our navigation page or contact us. For another reference, we also did the reductive navigation on the Costume Kingdom site.

Thanks,

Megan
Vortx.com
LiveWire Ecommerce Blog

Hi Megan,
Sorry to bring this thread back up. I landed here from google.

I posted a question a while back in a similar issue to this.

We are a retailer of auto parts, we need the site to be able to drill down the products by "Vehicle Year Make Model Trim", can your product do this?

Basically, we need 4-5 levels of filtration - Year, Make Model, Submodel, Trim

Please e-mail me directly at mike at optionimports.com if you wish to take it out of the discussion board. we are looking a new platform to replace our current one.