You can create facets that organize products based on any product or SKU property defined in your catalog, but some properties are particularly good candidates. They are described in this section.
Many examples in this guide use a pricing facet that has a product list price or wholesale price property as the faceting property. Organizing products by price is a helpful navigational device, given that price is an important factor when purchasing products. Facets may produce ranges in $100 increments: $1-100, $101-200, $201-300, etc. Sites that have products spanning a large array of prices may find it useful to nest one pricing facet in another, so that larger groupings of products by price are then broken down into smaller ones. For example, one pricing facet creates selections in $100 increments and, clicking one selection, accesses a list of selections in $10 increments.
It may also be a good idea to create a facet that organizes products by category. For example, a clothing category facet might contain facets for size, materials, or sale status. A category facet provides a good starting point for a series of nested facets.
Most sites display products by category using a traditional tree hierarchy; using a category facet provides two added benefits:
As is the case for all facets, the selections that organize products are generated on the fly and the products contained in them are also determined dynamically.
Depending on the property you choose to be the faceting property – Default parent or Ancestor categories – you can control whether a product is included only in the category that contains it (the former), or that category as well as all of its parent categories (the latter).
Keep in mind that a category facet is different from a facet associated with a category. A category facet uses a product property that holds category information as the faceting property. For example, a category facet appropriate for a clothing store is clothing type, which might divide products into selections for woman’s clothing, men’s clothing, shoes, and gear. Such a facet would be associated with the Global Facets folder so that all categories defined in the catalog are available to it.
A facet associated with a category, conversely, is most likely to use a faceting property that’s suited only to the products in a particular category. A clothing store site might have a petite size facet associated with the woman’s clothing category, for example, so women can view all clothing based on petite sizes. Products in other categories (men’s clothing, shoes, and gear) won’t have petite sizes.
The main way to tell them apart is by knowing that a category facet is defined by how products are organized (by category), whereas a facet associated with a category is defined by the products available to the facet (the products in a particular category lineage).
Most faceting properties are the custom properties you design for your catalog that are unique to the products you sell. For example, a rug store might have facets for dimensions, materials, country of origin, and handmade/machine made. Usually, it is the values of properties unique to a set of products that best distinguishes one product from another; such properties are ideal for facets. Any enumeration properties, for example a material property that has options wool, polyester, and cotton, that can be divided up further (types of wool include angora and cashmere) may be easily represented as nested facets.
