Product Finders

Note: Product finders are not a standard Athos Commerce Product offering. Talk to your customer success manager to discuss adding this feature to your plan.

Product finders are a tool to help your shoppers quickly find the products they are looking for. These provide a way to easily navigate to a more narrow, filtered product results set. Commonly implemented as a set of attribute drop-down selectors, these finders can exist on your home page, globally across the header of your website, or even on a single category page or landing page.

Basic Product Finder

The most basic version of a product finder allows the shopper to choose their options in any order. The options for each drop-down selector are populated by any individual filter attribute field found in your core product feed.

Hierarchy Product Finder

A more advanced version of a product finder would force the shopper to select their options in sequential order. The most common example of this would be for vehicle finders, forcing shoppers to select a year > make > model in that order before hitting a results page. The options for a hierarchy finder would be sourced from a single attribute field, though following a specific data pattern.

To achieve a hierarchy finder, your attribute data must exist as a single field, following a hierarchical format. Consider the Year>Make>Model vehicle fitment examples list below:

1967>Ford>Mustang
2006>Chevy>Malibu
2013>Chrysler>300

Tip: The paths within this attribute field will determine the path selections of our hierarchy finder. If you want your shoppers to instead select in a Make>Model>Year order, then that's the order in which you should provide your data: Ford>Mustang>1697

If a product has multiple applicable hierarchy paths, you must include all of those assignments within one field, separated by a delimiter such as a Pipe "|". Consider a product that has multiple applicable vehicle fitments:

2009>Chevrolet>Traverse|2010>Chevrolet>Traverse|2011>Chevrolet>Traverse|2012>Chevrolet>Traverse|2013>Chevrolet>Traverse|2009>GMC>Acadia|2010>GMC>Acadia|2011>GMC>Acadia|2012>GMC>Acadia|2011>Honda>Accord|2012>Honda>Accord|2013>Honda>Accord|2014>Honda>Accord

Tip: With vehicle fitment data, rather than listing each year individually, you can use a year range on each applicable Make>Model combination. We would then expand this into individual year options within the finder selections for you:

2009-2013>Chevrolet>Traverse|2009-2012>GMC>Acadia|2012-2014>Honda>Accord

You are not required to use ">" to split the Path Levels, nor are you required to use "|" as the path separator. However, the delimiters you choose must be consistent and must not be found within the path assignment itself. For example, with a vehicle fitment of 1978 GMC C/K Pickup 1500, you would not be able to use "/" to separate Year/Make/Model, since the model value itself contains a slash character already.