Before you invest in product filtering

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Before you spend anything on product filtering, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Filters should reflect how customers choose, not how you catalogue
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Show result counts so nobody hits a dead end. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Keep filter state in the URL so results can be shared. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about product filtering before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Show result counts so nobody hits a dead end — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.