Quick filter (YMM)
The Quick filter section provides a quick and convenient way for your customers to find collections or products to purchase. As well as the Quick filter section, there are also Quick filter blocks within these sections: Rich text, Image with text, Video banner, Video with text and Collection banner.
Although the Quick filter can be used to find any kind of product, this guide will focus on the most complicated example of setting up a car parts store.
Setting up the Quick filter section
This guide assumes that your products already have metafields containing relevant information (such as Make, Model etc), and that filters for these are already set up using the free Shopify Search & Discovery app.
Setting up a menu
The Quick filter section (and blocks) are powered by the standard Shopify menus in the admin area in Content > Menus. In order to set up this section, a menu structure firstly needs to be built to the desired hierarchy to filter your products. For example, you want customers to select BMW before selecting ‘2 Series’ – so this hierarchy needs to be reflected in the menu structure.
Using the Ignite Hardware demo as an example, the following spreadsheet outlines how we planned out our menu structure: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PjsfzOOfz2LvlaMNli8JOQyMHwPVpaYTEk7vM1OVXjs/edit?usp=sharing
The side-by-side screenshot below indicates how this is built out, and how the Shopify menu maps to the spreadsheet:
The top-level links (e.g. BMV) go directly to the BMV collection, i.e. https://benchmark-automotive-demo.myshopify.com/collections/bmv
The second level (BMV > 1 Series) goes to a filter of this collection, e.g. https://benchmark-automotive-demo.myshopify.com/collections/bmv?filter.p.m.custom.model=1+Series – which is the same link you would get if you filtered the BMV collection by a Model of ‘1 Series’.
The third level (e.g. BMV > 1 Series > E87) again, is the link that results when you filter the BMV collection by that Make and Model, ie https://benchmark-automotive-demo.myshopify.com/collections/bmv?filter.p.m.custom.model=1+Series&filter.p.m.custom.generation=E87&filter.v.price.gte=&filter.v.price.lte=
To build out the spreadsheet (and then the menu), it’s a case of repeating this process until the menu is sufficiently built out to reflect the desired hierarchy. This process takes a while, so we recommend that you use a spreadsheet and get the data correct in that, before proceeding to map this to a Shopify menu. We are not aware of any way to to speed up this process as Shopify menus do not currently have a bulk editor option.
Note, the URLs of Shopify menus have a character limit of 255, so if your filter names or make/model names may need to be shortened if they are particularly long.
Using Quick filter as sub-navigation
Once a customer has used the Quick filter created in the previous section, they will be taken to the resulting collection page. The resulting page can also have a Quick filter section added to it, and can point to the same menu. If doing this, you can turn on the setting highlighted below:
When enabled, the Quick filter will attempt to select the first combination of suitable dropdown options for the current page. Note, if the quick filter menu contains duplicate entries, the first one will be selected, which may or may not be the one that the customer clicked to get to the page. We therefore recommend the quick filter menu contains no duplicates if using this setting.
