Jim2Commerce Product Specifications Strategy

The first part of the strategy is to decide if you want to use the specification as a filter or just as information for the customer.

Filters are presented on the Catalogue pages and are used to reduce the size of the product list based on the selection.

An example of this is Material with the options of Stainless Steel, Aluminium or Wood. If you select wood, you will see all the products that are made of wood listed in your view.

Another use of filters is where they can be used behind the scenes with advanced capabilities such as product ribbons, HTML Widgets, Anywhere Sliders, etc.

An example of how filters can be used is for a battery company that sells 12v, 24v and 48v batteries. A special product ribbon can be set to show on the product's images with colour coded ribbons and text representing the battery voltages. A special banner can also be set up using the Anywhere Slider to show an add for the 48v batteries for related products.

In all the above cases the specifications added needs to have options added for the filters to work.

If a set of products have a lot of filters and they are based on numbers, instead of having a very long list of options going down the screen, you can turn the filter into an easy-to-use slider. The data used in these options needs to be a number (decimal points can be used too). If any letters exist in the options, the function will not work.
 
If you would still like to show your customers rich information with wording, you can generate two sets of specifications and target the same specification attribute. The first set contains the pure numbers that are to be used in the slider (When adding them in set them so they are not viewable). Then add another set as Plain Text or HTML (as discussed in the next section) to the same specification and set as viewable. This will give you the best of both worlds where your product can be easily found and also present with rich information.

One of the most important roles of specification attributes is to relay the details of your products so they can be viewed and compared against other products in your range. Many of these are informational and not used as a filter to find the product.

These specifications do not need to be bound to options. One big advantage of this is that you can relay very specific details for individual products without having to generate an extensive options list.

These can also be used to extend the information of filtered attributes too. For example you have filters (options) for battery voltage such as 12V, 24V and 48V. On your range of 1000+ products you can specify further details as text specifications such as 12V (range between 9V -18V) use recommended charger. Each one of those thousand products could have a different specification, but they are all searchable from three options enhancing user experience.

This is not just limited to text; it can also show specifications in the form of HTML formatted information. This allows you to show formatted text ,including tables.