Grouping Filters & Mapping Versions to Refinements

There are 2 special automated filters that can be used.

Using Product Level Fields instead of Website Categories in your ePos/ERP

Both "Grouping Filters" and "Mapping Versions to Refinements" use VERSION TABLES and instead of assigning products to filters using WEBSITE CATEGORIES in your systems integration, you map PRODUCT LEVEL fields like a COLOUR dropdown or a SIZE dropdown (that are saved within a product record) to a VERSION in a VERSION TABLE – and then map the VERSIONS to parent FILTER GROUPS.

This means that as the products are being imported/updated from your ePos/ERP to the AB Commerce Platform, it uses the product fields to automatically generate the sidebar refinements.

Additional Feature – Only show refinements that are in stock

With this method, there is an additional feature where it only shows refinements for products that are in stock.  For example, if you have a product that comes in Small, Medium and Large, and you only have Medium and Large in stock, only these 2 refinements will appear for this product in the sidebar refinements.

Grouping Filters

You can group filters like COLOUR where there could be 100 different colours on your ePos/ERP, (e.g. 10 different shades of blue), the following steps automate these filters so that they are mapped to "parent filters" as having 100+ colours in a sidebar refinement is not usable.  Instead, for example, the 10 different shades of blue needed to be grouped under a parent filter of "Blue".

To group filters, you need to follow the articles under Versions / Variants and use OPTION 4.

Mapping Versions to Refinements

There are 2 options for mapping versions to refinements which are described under Versions / Variants and explained under OPTION 3 and OPTION 4.

• Option 1 - If the versions need to be grouped (as described above) - follow the steps to create OPTION 4 in the VERSIONS articles.
• Option 2 – If the versions do not need to be grouped, when setting up the versions table, you just need to select Add Auto Filter Table and the versions are automatically created and updated from the FITLER GROUP table. So as you add filters to the filter group, they will automatically appear under this version table and all versions will be automatically mapped to the corresponding filter in the filter group.  To do this, you need to follow the articles under Versions / Variants and use OPTION 3.