What is and how to use PrestaShop faceted search

Hard to imagine a store without a faceted search feature. This feature enables your store to provide an efficient way to search and filter products and usually leads to more sales.

PrestaShop has its faceted search engine, which is fast and efficient, so you don’t need any paid addons for that.

Let’s explore what benefits it has and how to enable it.

What Is PrestaShop Faceted Search

Usually, this type of search (faceted search) is found in product categories. The filters block that is displayed in the sidebar is that faceted search. It gives the user a choice to filter products based on his needs and find what he is looking for.

I have been working with stores with 10k or 100k products, and it is hardly imaginable to have a store without a faceted search. It is one of the must-haves in ecommerce.

Fortunately, PrestaShop also ships this type of search as a separate addon - which is free.

By default, it comes installed, but if you can’t find it - head down to the back office, click Modules → Module Catalog and search for faceted. Install the addon and explore its configuration page.

When installed, this addon and its configuration will be available in the back office under Modules → Module Manager → search for faceted.

Going inside one of the saved templates, you will be presented with every filter available to PrestaShop in addition to custom attribution groups.

Recommendations For Faceted PrestaShop Search Config

In the faceted search configuration page (back-office → Module Manager → search for faceted), you can see many options to choose from. Of course, it might be tempting to select everything, but here are some ideas to think about.

Do you need a price filter? Only enable it if your categories contain lots of items. That is the case for phones or computers. Or any technologies related store.

But if your store contains items from 9 USD to 999 USD - having a price filter usually does not make sense. That might sometimes be the case when you sell phones (900 USD and up) and phone cases (9-19 USD).

Color options make sense only on a minimal range of items: phone and laptop cases, art equipment, clothes. Furthermore, adding the filter does not make sense when a product has multiple colors (book cover, for example).

Weight filter makes sense in sporadic cases. Usually, weight directly relates to a shipping price, but the shipping price is visible in the last checkout steps. So it might not make sense to add it to the frontend.

Show the number of matching products - enable this option only if you have 100 or more products in total. If numbers are meager (1-9), people will leave your store thinking it is unfinished or not big enough to be trustworthy.

Show products from subcategories - always enable this option. I saw a store before that would want this option disabled. The more products you will show - the more trustworthy and big your store will be seen.

Show unavailable, out of stock last - set to yes as it is a nice usability feature. Also, your store will look more prominent.

When thinking about filters, imagine what if you would be a potential customer for this item. And sort filters based on priorities. For example, if you are thinking about a fish tank, then probably your preferences would be:

• Liters
• Measurements
• Price

In this example, weight and color won’t apply. Price makes sense as 3rd option because Liters and Measurements would correlate too much. The cheapest fish tank will be the smallest inside.

Faceted PrestaShop Search Page

This is one of the most requested features in PrestaShop. Unfortunately, the team is not shipping this change for more than three years now, and you might need to search for a paid addon for this issue.

The faceted search feature is only available on category pages.

Conclusion

There are many ways to customize or market your PrestaShop store, so be sure to checkout EShopAddons blog.