magento uses the layered navigation system where when u filter a category with something say price, all the other possible selection in the price disappears in that filter, so if you want to pick another price range, you have to go back to the previous page or deselect the filter. unfortunately a lot of ppl dont know how to “deselect that filter” they just got lost on the website and left.
amazon and many other website already keep both selections and filters together, so you dont have to go to another step to refilter
This is definately something they should be looking into - it seems to make the “Multiple Select” option obsolete for the customer because when filtering you can only select one value anyway.
Or like eBay. Client should be able to select colors “green+black+blue” when they filter for color. Not just “green” and then have to go back for “black”.
I just wish that layered navigation actually worked.
One of the problems - price attribute is not displaying the simple products
associated with configurable product.
Does anyone who has dived into the layered navigation code have any idea how big a change this would be to the Magento core? The sidebar display should be relatively easy, but I don’t know the difficulty in showing product and breadcrumbs from multiple attribute values.
Our site will require the ability to choose multiple multi-select options. Multiple colors, sizes, prices would be a plus, too.
wow, guys the nav displayed by Morningtime is AMAZING the best i have ever seen, even better than ebay. i would love this for my magento store, does anyone have any idea if there is anything like it out there yet?
I like the idea of AJAX navigation. And I love the Adjustware products, by the way
Couple things. I think the ability to choose MULTIPLE options on one layer is brilliant. But your demo uses “OR” while I’d prefer “AND”. The way I understand layered navigation, as choices are made, items are filtered out, layered nav options that no longer apply should disappear. The product list should get smaller instead of larger. And at no point should my customers see “No products match.” That said, some people DO want to search for red OR pink, kinda link on eBay. {{{shrug}}}
Secondly, if I choose a price range and a color(s) then go onto a subcategory, those price and color choices better still be applied. After all, I DID want to search by cheap and pink....
Hi,
Thank you for the kind words and for your feedback.
> But your demo uses “OR” while I’d prefer “AND”.
Hmm, but this work only for multiselect attributes. For example if you have a 120Gb hard disk and a customer
selects 120 AND 160, the system will show nothing ... so we decided to use OR logic for now.
> Secondly, if I choose a price range and a color(s) then go onto a subcategory, those price and color choices better still be applied. After all, I DID want to search by cheap and pink....
It CAN be done by request. We remove this feature as there is a side effect: once you select cheap and pink and then select a category and THEN change your mind
the module does not allow to clear selection.
Again, thank you very much for the feedback, we plan to upgrade the Layered Navigation Pro extension and add missing features as well as improve the current if our customers request it.
I actually prefer non-ajax due to navigability reasons (bookmarking, back button, etc..) and in practice the load times do not seem to be any slower. I am developing an extension to the layered navigation myself that does this without ajax. In fact it even works without Javascript.
It works like so:
-All options that are avaliable in the category (no filtering applied yet) are present at all times in the LN. E.g., if the category is “Women’s Shoes”, then the sizes available would be limited to women’s shoe sizes.
-When you toggle more than one value for an attribute it ORs it with the others in that attribute. Adjustware is right, AND would only be useful for multi-select attributes which would be possible. The options for each attribute are ANDed with other attributes (e.g., Black or Blue, AND Size Small or Size Medium).
-When a value is selected for an attribute, all values in the other attributes that would result in 0 matches are disabled (greyed out, not clickable) so that at no point can the user see a “No products” page.
-If there are any selected values an icon is added to the attribute to remove all selected options for that attribute.
Another feature we did was to “group” attribute values. We have ~60 specific colors which makes LN a pain, so we have groups that are configurable via the backend so that only a handful are shown in the LN. This requires no additional product configuration. Could be repeated for any attribute such as monitor size ranges, etc..
The selections could be persisted in a session but you’d only lose them when changing categories which could be drastically different depending on your store.
Let me know if you are interested, but I have not packaged it into an easily distributable module yet.
However AJAX is quite popular and a lot of web shoppers just like it (no matter fast it or slow) .
And the last, but not least: with the AJAX’ed layered navigation you can remove links from the filters at all, so there is no more “Duplicate Content” penalty from search engines.
just thought i would let you all know that i am using this extension and love it. if you want to see it working in a shop with more than 1000 products have a look at http://www.iconicwatches.co.uk/
Also please note that i found the chaps very helpful and accommodating, customer service was truly excellent..and no i don’t work for them or know them personally!
thanks all, if you have any questions about my experience with the extension just reply
