Powerful Filtered Product Search (Am I missing something?)

[DXC]

I believe that it was the launch of Weebly 4 back in September of 2016 when the "Store Page" was removed in favor of a method involving the use of ecommerce widgets to achieve a similar result. Keep this in mind as I continue my...rant. Lol

The page types available before (left) and after (right) the launch of Weebly 4.

A quintessential feature for any ecommerce platform is the ability for customers to browse all of the products in a store, then utilize filtering options to narrow the results. For those who only need to display a handful of items on their website this may seem a tad unnecessary. However, for the users on the opposite end of the scale who plan on adding 50+ products to their website, having a filtered product search is absolutely mandatory.

Weebly prominently displays the "Powerful Filtered Product Search" feature on their ecommerce features page. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out where these filtering options are or if they even exist. Well, they actually do exist...if you have a search box on your website and perform a search. Pending whether or not you have products (and different options available for those products, i.e., color, size, etc.) on your website, the search should return products accompanied by a sidebar with filtering options. When I read "Powerful Filtered Product Search" my first thought definitely wasn't "Oh, they're referring to the search results page for the website search box." The graphic that is being used on the features page is confusing, with the overlay showing a storefront with product filtering options and the underlying mock-up showing site-wide search results.

It isn't obvious that the page shown here is displaying site-wide search results...until you disable the overlay.

Would it be too difficult for Weebly to bring back the "Store Page" with the addition of the sidebar from the current search results page? I know that it wouldn't be hard for me to code what I'm asking for (which I'm going to have to do anyway), but it just seems like something that should already be in place.

I'm interested to hear what people have to say about this, and I look forward to the future of this platform. Thanks.

[Adam7]

Thanks for your feedback on our current set of Store features, @DXC. I think the easiest way to make a store page like you could in the past, is to make a single Category that contains all your products, then use the Category element with that Category on your "store" page.

[DXC]

@Adam,

So, the problem with this is that it doesn't allow users to filter through all of the items on the store. It doesn't matter how detailed you get with categorization and subcategories, because users that click on a category will be taken to a different page entirely. I want all of the products on the same page and the ability to show or hide products based on filtering options like price, color, etc (just like on the search results page).

My "duck tape" solution was to <iframe> the product search results page into another effectively masking the URL (I don't want people to go to the store page, but see the search results URL). Then I used <base target="_top"> to set the target for links from the <iframe> to the parent window. I'm going to style the search results page to look like it is part of the store, and no one will be any the wiser.

I just wish I didn't have to go to such lengths. Lol

[Adam7]

Ok, I think I have a better understanding of what you need. There's a post to Vote on Features about that which could use your kudos if you haven't seen it yet:

https://community.weebly.com/t5/Vote-on-Features/Product-Filters-Filter/idi-p/9688

[jajcs]

DXC, does your solution actually work? I was thinking that selecting categories just adds the whole of any additional categories used in the filtering anyway. So it doesn't help a lot even if you do have the category-filtering list handy. For example, it I search for Boots in a shoe shop, it displays all boots. If I filter by Women, it shoes only women's boots. But if I filter by Men and Women, it doesn't just show only the boots that are for men and women - it shows all men's boots and all women's boots. That's not really what I would call powerful filtering.