ShopBy Attributes add-on by Plugables allows customers to quickly and conveniently filter and navigate the products based on their properties and attributes. This advanced implementation of ‘shop-by’ feature for AbleCommerce stores remembers the shop-by criteria selected by the user and allows the user to further refine the search by selecting additional criteria.

Live Demo: See ShopBy Attributes in action at Danier

Consider a case where a customer is purchasing summer clothes for a baby girl on an online store. The possible actions that he/she can perform to search his/her desired product are as follows:

  • Choose ‘Product Type’ e-g ‘Clothes’
  • Choose ‘Gender’ e-g ‘Female’
  • Choose ‘Age e-g ‘1-2 Years’
  • Choose ‘Season’ e-g ‘Summer’
With ShopBy Attributes module installed on the store, the customer can simply click to select attributes ‘Clothes’, ‘Female’, ‘1-2 Years’, and ‘Summer’ on the navigation of the page. As the customer clicks on the options the results get filtered out automatically.
The implementation of ShopBy Attributes by Plugables makes use of product templates feature in AbleCommerce. The merchant defines a product template for the shop-by attributes. This template is then used to decide the options and option choices to be shown to the customer for selection.

Features

  • Easy and convenient navigation for narrowing down to desired products based on their properties.

  • Can be used with different kind of attributes and properties associated with a product using product template.

  • Highlights current selections in the filter box.

  • Remembers user selection and allows selection of multiple choices.

  • User can add/remove selection criteria choices easily.

  • Can be used on the catalog as a whole, or on a specific category. The results display page is an AbleCommerce category display page.

  • When applied on a particular category the products of that particular category can then be browsed and narrowed down using shop-by feature. Other categories may use different display page and may be browsed normally.

  • Easy setup and installation.

  • For each option choice the product count can also be displayed. This however is not recommended for large catalogs as it can affect the performance.

  • Improves user experience with fast and easy navigation.

Installation

To install ShopBy Attributes add-on get the latest version from here. The zip file you get will contain the following files and folders

  • ReadMe.pdf
  • Website

The installation of ShopBy Attributes add-on is pretty simple you just need to copy all files from Website folder to your store where AbleCommerce is installed. Copy all files to the corresponding directories in your store. For example copy everything from Website/ConLib/ folder to ConLib folder of your store and so on.

Please make sure that you take backup of any existing file that gets updated.

Usage

On your store you can make use of the features made available by ShopBy using the ConLib controls.

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[[ConLib:ShopBy/ShopBy Caption="ShopBy" ProductTemplateId="123" ShowCount="True"]]

Caption property is used to show the caption header for ShopBy Control. The default caption is ‘Shop By’.
ProductTemplateId is the ID of the template that is to be used for defining the ‘shop-by’ attributes.
ShowCount property is used to display the number of products associated with each attribute. Default value is ‘False’.

Note: Get ‘ProductTemplateId’ by mouse over on Product Template from Admin–>Catalog–>Product Templates, and see the ProductTemplateId in URL in status bar.

Get ShopBy Attributes Module here

ShopBy Attributes module for AbleCommerce
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