What to ask your agency about product filtering

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on product filtering, these questions are worth asking early.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Filters should reflect how customers choose, not how you catalogue. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Keep filter state in the URL so results can be shared. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The short version

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about product filtering before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Filters should reflect how customers choose, not how you catalogue — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.