Over last some years I have worked on many requirements gathering the projects or discoveries with the retailers moving to Shopify & layered navigation and filtering is the area that comes up in the discussion. Shopify has basic filtering functionality, based completely on the tag values that just support flat and  single-select app. It is a weakness of the Shopify against the competitors – however you may get around it through some apps available and check out Shopify collection filter.

Functional requirements are normally needed for the solution are:

• • Multi-select filtering (the multiple values on single filtering option) – it is not available natively through Shopify
  • Multi-faceted filtering (canability to use combination of the filtering options & refine down to items that meet the criteria) – this is not available natively through Shopify
  • Ability to use the filtering with native Shopify product (still served through liquid and not JavaScript)
  • Re-organise the filtering options
  • Retain order or merchandising of the original collection web page with the remaining products (or pre-filter)

• Ability to assign one single select & multi select filtering option against filters – it is not available natively through Shopify
• Usage of the rich features, like color swatches, value search, price slider, and product count against the features, and review filtering and more – this is not available natively through Shopify
• Ability to retain the custom badging & overlays

There are more desirable and non-essential features that are:

• Can control the filtering parameters & define how Google or other search engines will crawl & index the filtering web pages
• Integrated visual merchandising abilities (with an ability to assign the rules & weightings)
• Ability to inject the custom content & meta data against the specific filter web pages
• Integrated view or quick buy functionality
• Can handle same values as single and multiple filter options

Let us check out multi-select filtering

The multi-select filtering in Shopify is an ability to select 2 options (within one single filtering group) and filter product set that will match both the values. The example can be showing “red” & “blue” jumpers.

Reliance on the JavaScript

I have looked at many different solutions to filter in Shopify Plus & most of the good ones load the filtering and product grid through JavaScript that is not something that many retailers wish to rely from the organic search or SEO perspective. Even though Google has got much better in crawling JavaScript, and other search engines are not very good and it is not the good thing to actually rely on, in my view. I have seen retailers to see the drop when they are moving from in-line product grid at JavaScript-based approach. If you aren’t happy with JavaScript-based approach, you can find other best option that can tick that has other requirements.