Hi! Our site (https://www.mainleygallery.com) showcases artwork by local Maine artists. We have a premium gallery approach to our site design, and wish to drive customers through a page about the artist before presenting them with items. We're doing this using "standard pages" (e.g., https://www.mainelygallery.com/brier-rose-werner), and an "artist category" to link all items by that artist. We've suppressed "shop all" and do not show the category links or filter/sort functionality, to present a simplified view of items only grouped by artist.
We're considering widening the approach and also presenting a category hierarchy (think paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photography, etc). I've attached a mockup of what that'll look like, though it's not live yet. So each item would be given an artist category("Pablo Picasso) as well as a product category ("Painting").
One issue I'm having with this that the "similar items" content block shows items from whatever category was used to arrive at the item page. So, if you browse from the artist category, all the items in "similar items" are from that artist. But when browsing from a product category, it shows other category items (e.g. paintings), and there's no way to get back to the list of the artist's work! That's super important to the owners. We want to drive customers to see all of that artist's portfolio.
OK! Long-winded, I know. My question is, does anyone know how I might work around this issue, and present a list of similar items by artist category on the item page, no matter how the user arrived at that item?
I'm really hoping it's possible without doing manually. We have over 500 items in the catalog already, and we only opened the gallery 2 weeks ago. Doing this by hand for every item (e.g. creating custom content blocks on every item page) is simply not going to work.
Thanks for your feedback!
