With the current boom in eCommerce and the recent launch of WooCommerce 2.0 (which makes it really easy to sell your products online), the web is seeing an increasing pool of eCommerce websites selling larger and larger ranges of products.
With a large range of varying products, the most important factor in your customer’s time spent on your website is that they can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, ultimately resulting in a purchase.
Today, with this in mind, we’re launching Product Finder, an advanced search extension for WooCommerce.
How Product Finder helps Woo… how can it help you?
Product Finder is designed to help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for and to search through your catalog using logical conditions. This could mean searching for all motorbikes by their engine class, colour and size, or searching for records by genre, format and category… Product Finder shapes itself to fit your store.
At WooThemes, the idea for Product Finder arose from our own product search form, found in our various product categories. This enables visitors to WooThemes.com to quickly find the exact type of theme or WooCommerce extension they’re looking for, as well as to see other options we’d like to recommend, based on the visitor’s search criteria. With our ever-growing product catalog, consisting of hundreds of products to choose from, we feel it is of utmost importance to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for in a clear and intuitive manner.
In October 2012, when we redesigned everything on WooThemes.com, we introduced the advanced search functionality you see today when browsing through our product catalog. As a result of this, we’ve seen a notable increase in conversions.
View the Product Finder listing View Product Finder on our Appply themeHow does Product Finder fit into my store?
Working with the native attributes and categories in your store, Product Finder allows granular control of which attributes are displayed to your customers, as well as giving the customer the opportunity to choose how each attribute factors into their search (for example, searching for products that contain one attribute but not another).
The plugin includes a template tag, shortcode and widget to display your search form where you feel is best suited to your website’s design.
With access to clear and informative documentation included with each purchase, integrating Product Finder into your website should be a matter of 1, 2, 3.
We look forward to seeing how Product Finder helps you to sell to your customers and helps your customers find what they’re looking for in your store.
Grab any WooCommerce extension with a 25% discount coupon, valid until Midnight (UTC), Friday 8th March, 2013. Just use WC2LAUNCH as your coupon code on checkout.
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It’s certainly powerful. I like it. I’m not yet sold on whether the average site visitor could use it though. Perhaps, I am merely just not giving the average site visitor enough credit?
Since site visitors aren’t going to be that familiar with what Boolean logic is (which is more likely than not), does anyone else consider it a potentially big ask that they (understand how to) construct logical conditions like this? Is it intuitive enough?
I want to know if I’m just possibly over-thinking this because I love it and would definitely implement it otherwise.
I tend to agree with Matt on this, I don’t think the average user will understand this logic (my customers are aged 40+). Perhaps an autocomplete search function would be way more needed than this advanced search tool. Let me know what you think.
Obviously you should only use extensions which are appropriate for your target audience 🙂
I haven’t tried it, but there is a predictive search plugin on .org. Might be worth a look?
I implemented the Predictive Search plugin and do believe that this is the way to go – rather than having a powerful but (too) complex search logic.
It might have its use-cases when it comes to price ranges f.ex. but the greater benefit comes from the auto-complete feature.
Downside: The SQL-queries are (depending on your server-setup) very slow and the user might often not get to the point of actually making use of it…
Hi Matt,
I get your point, but we picked the phrases ‘is’ and ‘is not’ as they are the most simple to understand and we believe this will work for most individuals whether they are familiar with boolean logic or not. This method of searching is also the way that WordPress handles search queries, so with this extension we are leveraging the WordPress query to be as powerful as possible for WooCommerce.
That being said – you should always pick extensions based on whether they will work for your customers or not 🙂
I am searching for both an e-Commerce and Product Finder Plug In to add to my existing site so that my customers can search for, find and purchase Scooter spare parts.
Already a user of wooslider I am a fan of Woo’
However I simply want the user to:
First choose Scooter Make (from a drop down of options ideally)
Second choose Scooter Model (from a drop down of options generated according to the Scooter Make chosen first)
Once the Scooter Model is chosen the correct spare part will be shown with details and e-Commerce options to purchase.
CAN THE WOOFINDER EXTENSION ACHIEVE THIS?
Any advice welcomed…
BRGDS,
PJ
Hi Paul,
This extension won’t fill such a specific need, but I would recommend that you check out our Ajax Layered Navigation extension and if that doesn’t solve your need then post your task on the Codeable job board.
Totally agree with energyfreak here. I think a good autocomplete function is a better option to help visitors find their way.
Talking about navigation: the best way to navigate i found is on the coolblue platform, see: http://www.laptopshop.nl for example (one of their shops). Here you navigatie the ´normal´ way by just clicking the product category you like. When you get ´deep´ enough the navigation style changes from normal ´menu´ to ´filter´.
What we need is a robust faceted search on product attributes. I’ve seen lots of requests for this important functionality. I tried Ajax Layered Navigation and it just didn’t have enough functionality.
~Jeff
That kind of faceted search is exactly what this extension offers 🙂 You can see it in action here.
Cool! I’ll give it a try.
Does it work on non product category archive pages? That is a huge limitation of the Ajax Layered Navigation plugin.
I need to be able to provide a robust faceted search of product attributes from within widgets and page headers located ANYWHERE within the site, then return a result (can go to a product category archive page at that point). Having to go to a product category listing THEN search is not intuitive.
Does this plugin support that?
By the description it looks like with the widget/shortcode/template tag that it supports putting it anywhere on your site…I just want to confirm that. Thnx
Yes – the shortcode/template tag can be used on any page or post on your site and the widget can be added to any widgetized area of your site and it will show up on all pages whether it is a product archive page or not 🙂
Sweet…I’m in.
but I need a coupon 🙁
Unfortunately our WooCommerce 2.0 launch coupon is no longer available, but you don’t need a coupon to purchase this extension (or any of our products).
I know Woo have moved away from the app type themes, but this plugin would be a perfect fit with the Listings theme. I’ve a few clients for whom I’ve installed this theme and although the built in search functionality is ok, it’s not always as accurate or flexible as I’d like. Would it be possible to make this work with Listings??
This extension is designed to work with WooCommerce as it uses product attributes and categories to handle the search. As such, it won’t work with the custom post types or taxonomies that you create in Listings. However, that is a good idea for enhancing Listings (or any theme with many post types), so we will have a look into it at a later stage. Thanks 🙂
I tend to agree with Matt on this, I don’t think the average user will understand this logic (my customers are aged 40+). Perhaps an autocomplete search function would be way more needed than this advanced search tool. Let me know what you think.
As James pointed out above, a plugin like that already exists. However, auto complete only really works if the customer knows the name of the product they are looking for – Product Finder allows people to find specific products without knowing what they’re looking for in the first place 🙂
Great extension, does it show items from variations that are in or out of stock
Product Finder adds onto the built-in search logic of WooCommerce, so if an item is not set to show in a normal search then it will not show in this search.
Hello,
I tried to install the new version of woocommerce on my shop.
I’ve been using the Artificer theme all of this time, but when I did the last update I
receive a message from Woodojo telling me that this is theme doesn’t support woocommerce anymore. It’s kind of upset as this theme was really good for my shop and I had to set up everything again, when will you have a look on this theme and fix it?
Even if this new version receives a new name a becomes public, otherwise I will be stuck in the latest version for a long time.
This is a new inspiration for many people. Thank you for sharing with us.