Finding the right product to buy isn't easy. In a large store, it can literally take hours to search through hundreds of offers.

Product filters help shoppers find products faster by selecting parameters to leave only the products that fit. Instead of looking at hundreds of offers, they can browse through a dozen.

Built-in CS-Cart filters let customers search by product price and product features like brand or screen size, which is great. However, they do have limitations:

• no ability to search by product options like color or size
• you can't use images as filter variants
• if you have a hundred brands, they'll all be shown as filter variants and unnecessarily take up a lot of space

Here are three add-ons from the CS-Cart Marketplace that address these limitations and make CS-Cart's filters even better.

Option Filters

If you sell t-shirts of different sizes, you probably use the size product option. Since CS-Cart’s built-in filters can't search through product options, your customers have to open every t-shirt's page to know if you have their size in stock. That's not too convenient.

With the Option Filters add-on, your customers can filter products by color, size, and other options. If a customer needs a white t-shirt in a medium size, he or she just picks these options in the filters to narrow the product list. Handy!

Filter by Images

With the Filter by Images add-on, filters become more visual: customers filter products by clicking the images of colors or shapes in the filters. It's always better to show red instead of writing "red" and show the shape rather than describe it.

Customers looking for bicycles want to see the frame shape, not just read that it's “round.” So just show it to them!

Selectbox/Dropdown Filters

The Selectbox/Dropdown Filters add-on makes filters more compact by hiding filter variants behind a drop-down list.

If your store has 100 brands, without this add-on, the Brand filter is a large list with a scrollbar:

Customers don't need to see all the brands. What they need is a quick way to select the brand they want to buy. Once they pick up the brand, there's no need to show the full list. It will just take up page space unnecessarily.

The Selectbox/Dropdown Filters add-on hides this list under the dropdown, making the Brand filter compact:

We hope these add-ons will help you improve the search experience for your customers.

CS-Cart Marketplace has over 550 add-ons. There's a lot to explore. We plan to post reviews like this one regularly here in the blog and in our newsletter. Subscribe via the form below so you don’t miss any!