How to Create Facets

Introduction

This guide will provide you with a simple step-by-step guide to creating Facets using Fredhopper's Merchandising Studio. This guide explains how to set up a Facet - this is not a technical guide.

Facets provide a way to help shoppers sort and find products intuitively. Faceted navigation is normally 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

• It is recommended that you have read 'Getting started with facets' before you create a facet.
• You need to have read and write permissions in the Merchandising Studio to set up facets.
• Have a good understanding of your product catalogue data and data quality.

Scenario

This guide describes how to set up a 'Sleeve length' facet to trigger on any product lister page whenever this attribute data is relevant and available. For example, the facet shouldn't show on a trousers product lister page because your data shouldn't contain a value for sleeve length for trousers. Conversely, sleeve length attribute data would typically be provided on 'tops' products, and therefore this facet should also be available when the shopper lands on the tops product lister page. The facet should provide shoppers with the flexibility to select multiple options within the facet, i.e. '3/4 length' and 'Long' can be selected if required by the shopper.

Step by step guide

1. Open the Fredhopper Merchandising Studio and login using your credentials:
2. Navigate to Facets from the main menu and click New.
   Alternatively, a facet can be set up directly from Preview. If you want a facet to be applied to a particular product page, you can click on Create New whilst you are in that location in your Preview and choose Facet from the dropdown options:
   
3. Enter a name for your facet, e.g. 'Sleeve length'.
4. Click Select Scope, choose the scope that you want this facet to apply to, then click Select.
5. Next, you will need to select a trigger from the dropdown, for this scenario we will choose Value Distribution.
   Note: if you do not add a trigger the facet will show wherever there are values for the facet. These can be classified as Global facets e.g. Category, Price or Brand. As opposed to Local facets e.g. Product capacity, Sleeve length or Max. height.
6. From the 'Select type' dropdown, choose Coverage.
7. From the 'Select attribute' dropdown, choose Sleeve length.
8. Change the dropdown next to Minimum coverage: Any to 30%.
9. Next, scroll down to the facet definition section of the page, and choose Sleeve length from the catalogue attribute dropdown.
   Note: adding this attribute provides the name for the facet as well as Fredhopper knowing where to pull the data from. The display name is managed in System - Localisation.
10. From the 'Collapse' dropdown, choose Expanded.
11. The Display conditions will be set to default. But for this scenario, change the options as follows:
    
    Note:
    1. Changing the Minimum to 2 settings will only show the facet if there are more than 2 attributes available, i.e. will not show if only the Short sleeve length option is available for the product lister page, but will show if Long and Short sleeve (2 or more) is available for the product lister page.
    2. Changing the Lateral setting to Multiselect allows the shopper to choose more than one of the options, i.e if 'no sleeve' and 'cap sleeves' are available from the facet list of options they can choose both.
12.  Once you have added all the information, click Save in the above menu.
13. It is good practice to check the facet is firing as expected before you send it for publication, so go to your preview site, by clicking 'Preview' in the top right of the screen. Check that the facets display on the product lister pages as expected.
14. You can still edit your facet if required, otherwise, click on 'Send for publication'.
    

Once this has been published the facet will appear on your front end depending on your cache process.