Getting Started with Facets – Rezolve Ai Support Portal

Introduction

This guide will provide you with the necessary information to use facets in the Merchandising Studio. Any Merchandising Studio user (with the required studio privileges) can create and edit facets.

Facets provide a way to help shoppers sort and find products intuitively. Faceted navigation is usually found in the sidebar of a site. Each ecommerce site is different, and facets should be individually implemented when determining what needs to be improved for the shopper's satisfaction. Setting up facets provides a structure to your site to help shoppers understand the content space, and give them ideas about what is available and how to search for it. Facets can also help shoppers refine and find products in large categories/search results.

Prerequisites

You need to have read and write permissions in the Merchandising Studio to set up facets.
A good understanding of your product catalog data and data quality.

Key information about this feature

Purpose of this feature	Facets provide a mechanism for shoppers to navigate and move around the site in a logical manner and refine long lists of products to narrow their selection.
Menu name in Merchandising Studio	Facets
Sub-menu name in Merchandising Studio	N/A

What you need to know

When setting up facets there are a few things to keep in mind:

Their placement in the catalogue:
- Specify the facet trigger, i.e. gender type, navigated to product listing page, or for a specific search query.
- The order in which the facets will appear in a page i.e. Show Category, then Brand then Price on the homepage. Show Price, then Colour then Brand on a product listing page
Their visualisation – how they will appear i.e price sliders, checkboxes allowing multi-choice, or a colour swatch (these are set up on request and are not part of the standard default options)
The sorting of their values – what order the values within the facet should appear i.e. alphabetically, manually ordered, or by the size of the products available for each value
Grouping of the values: group-specific facet values i.e. where a colour is split over more than one value (Blue = aquamarine, navy, baby blue, sky blue, cornflower blue etc.., or grouping sizes into S, M or L)

It is valuable that you have a really good understanding of your product catalogue and how to make facets useful in your shopper's journey.

Configuring a facet

The feature requires input of at least three values:

The facet display name
- This should be a unique name that provides a short description of what the facet is. Note that this isn't the display name of the facet, but what it's called in your Merchandising studio - the facet display name is configured in System - Localisation.
The Trigger
- This is an event or situation, etc. that causes the facet to be displayed, so an example of a trigger is when a shopper lands on a lister page or searches for a product, this would trigger what facets are provided. More information on facet triggers below. A good example may be setting a date/time trigger of 1st September would mean the facet will not display on site until after this date.
- You can create global or local facets. Global facets are set to trigger on every page e.g. Category; Womens, Mens, Kids, Home, Electrical etc ... as opposed to a facet that is only locally relevant; Capacity, Wattage, Sleeve Length etc.
The Facet definition
- Content
  - Catalogue Attribute; this is the attribute that you want to base a facet on.
  - Collapse - this determines whether the facet is open, showing the values or closed where the shopper will have to click to open to view the values.
  - You may have other custom options here, like a colour swatch facet, or a slider facet (i.e. for price), these options are typically set up at your implementation stage. If you want to add custom facet definition these can be set up in your Merchandising Studio System settings, or in some cases, this would also require front end development to integrate fully if you do not currently utilise this feature.
- Facet Values
  - Here you can specify a group or range of attribute values that will aggregate into one selection (as if they were all the same value). This can be useful in a wide variety of scenarios, including but not limited to defining price ranges or classifying items based on technical specifications. For example:
    - An electronics retailer might want to group all of their sound systems to 'Watt' ranges instead of listing each wattage value separately.
    - The facet value feature's appearance is slightly different depending on whether the facet in question is based on a numeric attribute (such as int or float) or a grouping attribute (such as list or set). With numeric attributes, you can specify ranges instead of groups. For example, you may want to group a waist size range for Small, Medium and Large. Size 26 and 28 will be grouped in the Small value, size 30 and 32 will be grouped in the Medium value, and 34, 36 and 38 will be grouped in the Large value:

Note: By default all values available for the selected catalog attribute will appear as facet values (unless grouped in a list of values). To block values from appearing as a facet value, add them under "Blocked facet values".

Display conditions

Sort by – Allows you to define the order of the facet values. Can order by Name (alphabetical), Numeric, and Size. From High to Low or Low to High. The ID is generally never used.
- Size refers here to the number of available products in a value i.e. there are 22 black products, 35 blue products, and 13 white products. Therefore if ranked by size high to low these 3 values would appear blue then black then white.
- Numeric refers to a numeric attribute, for example, you wish to show a Review Ratings' facet and want to rank this numerically high to low so that your highest review rating appears at the top.
Minimum - Allows you to define the minimum number of values required to display the facet e.g: 1, 2 or more. The best practice is to always set this to 2 so that a facet is returned when a minimum of 2 value options are available. Showing only 1 option is not very useful for your shopper's experience.
Number of values - Allows the business user to define the number of facet values displayed. If you choose 10 but there are more than 10 facet values then there will be an option to 'show more' on your front end.
Lateral – Defines how the facet behaves after a facet value has been selected:
- Off – facet is not returned on the next page
- On – facet is returned on the next page until a further selection is made
- Multiselect – there are two different types of multi-select aggregation options available:
  - Aggregation:
    - Or when 2 or more values are selected, then OR logic is applied to the selections. For example, in the case of selecting colours 'red' and 'blue', items whose 'colour' attribute contains 'red' OR 'blue' will be returned
    - And when 2 or more values are selected, then AND logic is applied to the selections. This can be beneficial when searching for items based on compatibility. For example, when searching for a travel suitcase where you want to see only those suitcases that have, for their 'Allowed as Cabin Baggage' attribute, both 'British Airways' AND 'Lufthansa' as values.

Multiselect can be used with facets that are either of the following basetypes:

Set
List

With the 'set' basetype you get the choice of using OR or AND logic for your multi-select, while with the 'list' basetype it is automatically set to OR logic, and is unchangeable. To understand your attributes and which basetype they are, from your Merchandising Studio, go to:

System > Navigation > Navigation Index

Triggers

Triggers define, where, when or under what circumstances an action occurs in your Merchandising Studio. An action is something a customer does when they are looking for products or items in your catalogue. An action is what should happen once all the triggers have been satisfied (what are you trying to achieve with the configuration of your facet).

Triggers are “conjunctive”, when you add multiple triggers, they must form a connection to each other. i.e. all the triggers must fire together for the facet to show
All trigger conditions must be satisfied to result in the action

Triggers are selected from the dropdown (this list is taken from a demo site):

You can add more triggers at any stage, from your Merchandising Studio go to:

Systems > Management > Trigger types manager > Add new trigger.

Common triggers used for setting up facets

Option	Description
<any custom trigger>	The rule triggers when it meets the specified custom conditions.
Brand	The rule triggers when a brand name is, or is contained in the navigation or search.
Device type	The rule triggers when a specified device is being used by the shopper.
Keyword	The rule triggers when the shopper runs a search for a specific term.
Navigation steps	The rule triggers when the shopper makes a specific or a relative number of navigation steps.
Number of results	The rule triggers when a query produces a specific or a relative number of results.
Query type	The rule triggers for a specific type of query.
Result type	The rule triggers for lister pages of specific types.
User/Catalogue location	The rule triggers for a specific page or navigation path.
Value distribution	The rule triggers when it meets the conditions for the specified attribute values, more details below

Value distribution trigger

Best practice for cases where a facet that is only relevant for some categories or a subset of products is to use the Value Distribution trigger and specifically the Coverage option.

An example of this is where 'cuff type' is only relevant for shirts. So you may want to set up a cuff type facet with 50%+ coverage. With this facet set up, you will see a cuff type facet displayed with the relevant options whenever the percentage of shirts products is 50% or more on a product lister page, regardless of how the shopper gets there. For example, navigation to shirts, searching for shirts, or looking at a brand that mainly sells shirts.

Note: you would need to consider the depth of the shopper journey. If the Men's homepage contains 50% shirts the cuff facet will appear, but is this facet really relevant at this stage of their journey? It is important that you have scoped out the scenarios and the effects these will have before you set up any facets in your Merchandising Studio.

Another example of a Value Distribution coverage facet may be for a company selling home improvement tools and equipment, and if a shopper searches or navigates to the ladders page you may want a facet to apply that shows the Max. height options available. As this attribute is only relevant for ladders, it makes sense to provide a facet for this attribute as opposed to the Max. height facet appearing for other products, (e.g. screws) as this wouldn't make any sense to the shopper.

These scenarios are all set up using the Value Distribution trigger and choosing the option Coverage. Please note that the Dominance and Selection options are not in use.

Best practices

The priority of the facets found on the facet homepage replicates the order they will appear on your site. To reorder facets, change the priority on the facets homepage.
If you have created more than one facet using the same attribute on the same scope, only one will appear. This facet will appear according to the priority order.
If you create a new facet, this will automatically take priority one. These can be reordered in the facets homepage.
There are three key things to keep in mind when setting up your facets
1. Their visualisation, how do you want the facet to be displayed. Multi-choice list, colour swatch, price slider etc..
2. Placement in your site - are they global or local facets?
3. The sorting of the
  - values. This is dependent on the attribute base type. e.g. sorting numbers vs text will result in a different ordering
  - facet ordering - which facet is the most logical to display first, Category, then Gender, Brand and Price, for example.

Are you ready to create a facet? View our step by step guide.