Users who have ATG Merchandising and ATG Search also have a feature called Faceted Search that provides tools for designing dynamic navigational elements on your web site. If your site is an electronics store, for example, you can use this feature to organize TVs by screen size and price. A user who visits your site sees the following links: 5” - 20” TVs, 21” – 29” TVs, and 30” – 39” TVs. Clicking one link leads a user to a list of pricing links, each of which represents a list of products with a particular screen size and price.
Screen size and price are both properties of products. You use this feature to create a facet asset that represents a product property, so your site displays the values of the property as links. You may prefer separate selections for each property value, for example, one link for 5” TVs, another for 13” TVs and so on. Or you may prefer to organize a range of selections as demonstrated above.
In ATG Merchandising, you create facets, and decide how facets will organize products into selections and what products a facet will include in its selections. Some facets are available to all products (global), where as others are available to a subset of products (local), such as the products in a given category. Facets can work in tandem with other facets as they do in our example, or may work independently. After creating and defining facets, you can run tests that will show you the facets and selections produced by your settings to ensure that they work the way you anticipated.
You provide all of these guidelines in ATG Merchandising, which are then used in building selections that contain the appropriate products dynamically. How does that happen? ATG Search interprets the facets you define as search criteria and produces selections containing products as “search results.” To site users, these results appear as links to products.
When you use Search Merchandising and Faceted Search together, ATG Search incorporates the search configuration settings (created with Search Merchandising) in the search query text used to produce a list of products. Once that list is produced, ATG uses your facet settings to create selections and populate them with the appropriate products.
In order to use this feature, an administrative user needs to configure ATG Search to process your facets and a page developer needs to implement them on site pages, both of which are described in the ATG Commerce Search Guide. The tasks performed by a merchandising user are explained in the following sections:
