Every online store owner faces the task of finding a good website administrator or handling this work themselves. If you have a small number of products, categories, and product attributes, then this article will serve more as an informative guide rather than a strict instruction manual to streamline your processes and work. In that case, you can quickly configure filter sorting through the admin panel — and "you're good to go!"
However, if you own a large resource with lots of filters and parameters, this idea can truly help.
Business Process Automation
Business process automation is a large and quite complex field that combines many technologies and specialists: analysts, developers, and other professionals. Your site's filter system may not seem like a business process at first glance. However, if you have a large resource with hundreds of categories, you'll definitely need specialists (administrators) who will spend many hours organizing these categories and filters! After all, what’s trending and in high demand should be as accessible as possible and placed in a highly visible spot.
Automatic Filter Sorting
At first glance, the idea of automatic filters seems easy and simple! All you need is a good developer who can enhance analytics for categories and filters and add this data into your site’s database. In other words, you need code that records each interaction with a category or filter into the database. Based on this data, you can form the sorting order of categories in the menu and set the filter order for each category depending on demand. This helps increase sales and makes it easier for your potential customers to find products.
Complex Analysis
The presence of seasonal products and categories can significantly complicate the automation task. In such cases, simply tracking the number of clicks is not enough — you also need to account for seasonal demand.
To address this, we introduce a value coefficient based on the number of interactions with a category or filter, the seasonality of the product, and the analysis period. The calculation formula looks as follows:
DemandCoefficient = (NumberOfInteractions × SeasonalFactor) ÷ Time
where:
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NumberOfInteractions — the number of clicks or accesses to a category or filter over a selected period;
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SeasonalFactor — a coefficient depending on whether the current month falls within the product’s season:
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1.5 — if it's currently the season;
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1.2 — if it's one month before the season;
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0.7 — if it's off-season.
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Time — the number of days for which tracking is performed (for example, the last 30 days).
Thus, categories and filters that are more relevant during a certain period will automatically rise higher in the lists, while out-of-season ones will move lower. This allows you to dynamically adapt your site's interface to real customer needs, increasing the likelihood of selling trending products.
Example: In December, the "Ice Skates" category will receive a higher coefficient than "Bicycles", since it’s the active season, and the number of clicks will further boost its position in the filters.
Conclusion
Automating the sorting of filters and categories in an online store is not just a convenience for the administrator. Automation is a powerful tool for increasing conversion rates and sales. Through proper data collection, implementing a demand coefficient that accounts for seasonality, and automatically updating filter order, you can make your site adapt itself to customer needs.
The more categories and products you have on your site, the greater the need for automation. While a small store can still manually manage the order of elements, for a large resource, implementing a smart sorting system becomes a true competitive advantage.
By investing in such a solution once, you save hundreds of hours of manual work in the future and create the most comfortable experience for your customers.
We can assist you with the technical side of this solution, feel free to contact us!
