Advanced search/Refine search options?

[willage]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for some help or ideas on how to do the following, we run a skateboard shop and almost everything we do is governed by rider preference for the product i.e. size, colour, and brand.
We have over 500 skateboard decks (just the wood part!) in our skateboard section, this is then broken down into brands of which there are around 30-45, and then within each brand there are different width decks and different prices. Now for the skateboarder who knows exactly which size they prefer or has an exact budget we would like to make life easier for them by introducing a advanced search function, where they can specify size, price even colours and anything else we can think of.

At the moment the customer has to trawl though all the brands looking for what they want and probably by the time they have been all the way through it, they will have forgotten what they have seen. So if we could show all the results on one page this would be great. We would also like to put this across the clothing section as well.

Has anyone got or tried using anything like this, if so is there an easy solution (probably not!!) or will it be a long drawn out expensive thing to do?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Will
www.skatewarehouse.co.uk

[leehack]

With only 500 products, i'd encourage you to setup by brand and by price sections and duplicate the master products (paste as duplicate) into these alternative methods. Then you can offer multiple ways to shop, easy to manage and in reality just a few hours to setup, so no technical or further assistance needed.

There are some addons or plugins you could use to make it a bit slicker, you could possibly have jump lists like so - http://www.dogbedstore.co.uk/ - you can also see an idea on that site on how to offer your products.

[willage]

Thanks LeeHack,

The only problem with that is we only hold stock of 1/2 of each product, the problem with skateboard design is that it changes almost daily, so to keep making duplicates can be time consuming, plus we would like to implement across our whole site which is on the verge of about 6000 products. I think maybe using your method could get confusing.

Anymore help would be greatly appricated, what were the add ons/plug ins you were on about?

Thanks for your time.

Will

[AndyBorrett]

You could set up your own variables then set them to be searchable under the search settings menu. This way your customers can use the advanced search page to filter down onto what they want.