"Sort by" on results page

[NeilF]

Having visited many e-commerce sites, the "Sort by" feature seems to be an essential (and powerful) part of searching an online catalogue. This seems to be missing from Actinic and I haven't found millions (or evens tens) of posts for it on the forums.

By Price High to Low - Low to High
By Brand (variableA)
By VariableB

And so on...

Is this something standard out of the box that I haven't found or does nobody really value this feature?

[OriginalTouch]

Yes you can search by variables - there are many posts about it.

However, not sure about price low to high etc

[leehack]

Actinic is an offline database, not an online one and therefore your options in this area are somewhat limited. Best you can get is searching by price bands and by section as standard.

[OriginalTouch]

Good idea to set up variables on price bands if your search would bring up loads of products!

[NeilF]

Hi guys,

You've mis-understood my question. My site already searches several variables (Manufacturer/Type/Style are all variables added to the library by myself). What I'm talking about is sorting the results of the search in different ways.

For example, my site sells Fridges. Customer searches for Undercounter Fridges and gets say 10 results. They should then be able to sort those results by price, by colour, by energy efficiency, by height, by width, by depth, by warranty length etc... or whatever else attribute I think would be of use to my Customer's experience. It is often the case that a replacement fridge has to fit into a specific gap left behind by the failed unit and sorting by size would be of great benefit.

[leehack]

Hi Neil, i think you've misunderstood the answers. There is no standard functionality to do what you want after you have actioned the search. Anything you want to do is done before the search is fired, as it is offline database not online.

There may be a pretty in depth addon/adjustment that could be made, but i doubt it, i think you are doing all you can possibly do from what you are saying.

EDIT: 'fridges' does not work on your site!

PS: Get a link through to the advanced search page on your site, as it's quite hidden and hard to find.

[NeilF]

I'm not a web programmer so much of the technical stuff goes over my head.

Anything you want to do is done before the search is fired, as it is offline database not online.

It seems to me that the data is stored in files on the web server. When a search is made, the perl engine collects the information for each product that matches the criteria and (seemingly) puts it into the search results in the order in which it comes in the structure of the website. Surely, a more complicated i.e. better perl script could sort that information based on a variable rather than the fixed "order in which it is collected".

My question is this (to the techie type people), has it been done, can it be done, why on earth hasn't it been done yet? The success of sites like dabs, ebay and the like is based on their ease of use and flexibility. "Sorting By" is one of the powerful tools that sets these sites apart.

As the Actinic results page is not a fixed page but a page constructed at the time of the search dependant on the results, surely the sort order of the page is hard coded into the perl script as a fixed parameter. Could this not be re-coded to make it sort by on whichever criteria is chosen?

NB: At the moment, I haven't sorted out the keyword type stuff as the site is still under construction. It's only (as far as I can tell) searching the product description. The PPP/Demon issue (on my other post) is preventing me from moving on with development and keyword stuff is one of the last things on my list.

[leehack]

In theory Neil what you say is correct (at a hefty price i expect), i am merely talking about standard actinic functionality. It's sometimes hard to understand or indeed explain at times the difference between on and offline databases. With what you are saying these would all have to be done before the search is fired, else if the user decides after the search to sort by value, you would then need to start a brand new search and present the data accordingly. This could mean having quite a few different scripts or parts of scripts to achieve the presentation of results in the various ways.

Once it has its results from a search, that is it, they are static, you can't just grab them and do what you like then, although the extras do seem to be growing in this area.

Perhaps if Norman sees this, he can comment as he knows this area well.

[OriginalTouch]

Perhaps Neil is suggesting that instead of sorting the results after the search, that the search could be chosen to sort before the search is carried out?

[NormanRouxel]

has it been done, can it be done, why on earth hasn't it been done yet

No, yes, cost/time and other things to do first.

.. I haven't found millions (or evens tens) of posts for it on the forums

Little demand too it seems.

[Duncan Rounding]

This is a feature offered on mny major company stores and one for the wish list I think.

[fergusw]

Gabriel has a tool for uploading the Actinic database into an online mySQL database.
He has integrated this into his site(s) and has a feature whereby products can be ordered/arranged by price or alphabetically.
See here

His current implementation is to pull in the contents of a PHP page, using AJAX, of the relevant results based on the query passed.

This is completely separate from the Actinic search, but it may be something you could look at integrating in some form.
You can read about his SQL SYnc package here