A short guide to product filtering

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Everything we would tell a client about product filtering in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What is actually at stake

Filters should reflect how customers choose, not how you catalogue. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to approach it

Show result counts so nobody hits a dead end. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Where it usually goes wrong

Keep filter state in the URL so results can be shared. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.