[trade store] Store Home page improvements

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Hi,

I think the store home categories page looks best for customers, also because you can guide them to categories as “upcoming beers”, “specials” etc. But it is flawed because the customer cannot immediately find its own way by for instance select a beer style or a “show me all beers” list.

The product list view does all this, but sacrifices the visibility of the categories for this. BTW Here there is a problem that when you select a category in the list all the other categories on said list dissapear btw.

Thus I am requesting some kind of “best of both worlds” solution

[luke]

Thanks for this, Gijs, it’s a really useful way of framing the problem. You’re right that neither page was giving your customers everything they needed on its own, and we’ve made some changes off the back of it.

Categories now stay with the customer. Every product list, including a category page and a set of search results, now has a row of category buttons across the top: “All products” first, then each of your categories, with the one they’re currently in highlighted. So a customer who has followed “Specials” into a list can jump straight to “Upcoming beers” without going back to the store home page first. It’s read directly from your category setup, so it always shows every category you’ve got products in.

The store home page now offers two extra ways to start navigating. There’s an “All products” button, which takes a customer to the full list with all the filters available. And below your categories there’s now a row of beer styles, so someone who just wants to see your IPAs can get there in one click rather than having to guess which category they’re hiding in.

On the categories disappearing from the filter list. I can absolutely see why that looks like a bug, but it’s actually the filter working as intended, and it’s worth explaining why, because it’s the bit that shaped the fix above.

The category tick boxes on the left aren’t a menu, they’re a filter. They narrow down what’s already on the page. So when a customer ticks “Specials”, the numbers next to every other category are recalculated to answer “how many of these Specials are also in that category?”. If a category has no products in common with Specials, ticking it would return nothing at all, so it’s hidden rather than offered as a dead end.

That matters because a product can sit in several categories at once. Ticking two categories is a real question (“show me what’s in both”), and we didn’t want to take that away.

So the filter was doing its job. What was missing was the other job entirely, which is navigation: getting a customer out of the category they’re in and into a different one. The filter was never going to do that, whatever we did to it. That’s what the new category row across the top is for, and why it always shows all of them, no matter what’s filtered.

These changes should be live now Let us know what you think!

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for the quick reply - the trade store looks the same to me, so it is not live?

I don’t agree with your choice of approaching the filter menu. If a customer wants to list all and only Russian Imperial Stout and IPAs they should be able to do it as they would in a normal webstore.

It creates some unclear things: Consider the screenshot beneath. the filter on Imperial Stout shows (only) 3 other styles, because this particular stout is in a gift pack with 3 other beers. It suggest you can select multiple styles to list - but then it turns out to be only related to one product

[gijs-van-wiechen]

I spot now what you mean - will check it out!

[luke]

Apologies, Gijs - you’re right, the update wasn’t live yet It should be now.

I see where you’re coming from on the filtering, but this is how it is intended to work and has worked for years on the trade store (this isn’t a new feature). This is also how filters typically work on ecommerce sites. The number in the grey box after each filter shows you how many products would show if you ticked the box next to it.

[luke]

Sorry, I was typing my reply to you when you sent your last message and hadn’t realised you’d also replied. Let me know what you think.

[gijs-van-wiechen]

It works better now to navigate away in the tradestore, thanks!

As for the filtering, I guess you thought it through - I might be barking up the wrong tree.

Two more things:

• The standard all products list begins with other products (glassware etc.) that is not ideal - you should begin with beer and/or based on alphabet and/or abv.

• The giftpacks are still a bit weirdly nested. If I select beers below 0.5 for instance, it shows a giftpack nested under a beer that is not <0.5 and not under the beer that is <0.5 that is in the pack. see screenshot

[luke]

Thanks Gijs, both of those were worth raising and we’ve fixed both.

The list no longer opens with glassware. It was sorting purely on the product name, and the list/grouped view builds its headings in the order the products come back, so one early-sorting piece of merchandise was enough to pull the whole “Other products” block to the top of the page. Products now sort into blocks first: your beers, then mixed and gift packs, then merchandise, then services. Within each block it’s alphabetical, as you suggested.

The gift packs were our mistake, and it was in the display rather than the filter. When you filtered to beers below 0.5%, the pack was correctly matched, because it does contain a beer below 0.5%. What we got wrong was showing it underneath one of its beers, picked more or less at random from whichever was added to the pack first. That’s misleading enough on an unfiltered page, and much worse on a filtered one, because the beer we happened to show it under was outside the band you’d asked for.

A pack containing several different beers isn’t really a format of any one of them, so it now gets its own “Mixed packs” heading rather than being tucked under a beer. It sits between your beers and your merchandise in the list.

One thing we haven’t done. You also mentioned sorting by ABV. We’ve left that alone for now, because a list a customer can predict is worth a lot: if someone is looking for a particular beer, alphabetical means they know roughly where to scan for it. If sorting by ABV would genuinely be useful to your customers, do say and we’ll look at it properly. Don’t forget they can already filter by ABV range.

These changes should now be live. Thanks again for sticking with this thread, it’s led to a much better page!

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Hi Luke,

Your welcome

I’ll keep adding stuff then

• Add a filter for these other products so people can quickly go to add beermats and glassware after they ordered beer. now they have to scroll through the products.

• I am missing a required yes/no tick box on the customer form

[luke]

Thanks Gijs.

1. Product type filters - Beer vs stock items, etc - This is a great suggestion, we’ll look into this!
2. You should already be able to do yes/no questions on the customer form and choose if you’d like the question to be optional or required.

Let me know if I’ve misunderstood that second point.

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Hi Luke,

That tick box doesn’t show up when I want to edit or add a question

[luke]

The option for something to be required/optional is only shown for some question types. Have you first selected the question type? If you select “Question for this form only” and then “Yes / No”, the “Your customers must answer this” should start to show, but please let us know if not.

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Ok.

I get I got confused because I wanted to make the preformatted billing adress a required item but you can’t change that. but I see this is behind a check box in the form

I see the tick box showing up for new questions now

[luke]

Ah, so I agree that’s a little confusing with how the questions show to you (we’ll fix this). The billing address is effectively required as the users need to either check the Billing address is the same as the delivery address option or enter another address.

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@luke

1. Product type filters - Beer vs stock items, etc - This is a great suggestion, we’ll look into this!

This should now be live too!

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Hey Luke, here I am again. I noticed the order of the categories is not implemented on the category main page.

Would be great to tweak the order in which the category blocks appear

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Also would be great if we could override packaging date with a release date for upcoming products

[luke]

Thanks Gijs.

@gijs-van-wiechen

I noticed the order of the categories is not implemented on the category main page.

Would be great to tweak the order in which the category blocks appear

This has been fixed now. I’m sorry, this was a mistake on our side that meant the sorting changes were not being saved properly. You’ll need to drag and drop categories into the correct order again. Then the home page should show them in the chosen order.

@gijs-van-wiechen

Also would be great if we could override packaging date with a release date for upcoming products

This should already be possible using either Expected release dates for planned packagings and Delayed releases when packaging stock. Let me know if I’ve not understood this request correctly.

[gijs-van-wiechen]

Please stop me if or tell me to raise another topic:

• The beer page does not show the beer style
• The thunbnails are hardly legible.
• Auto-compress pictures? Loading time is quite long.

[luke]

Thanks Gijs. Although long-running threads like this don’t really follow the rules, so far each has been just of a small tweak and we’re having a push on the trade store tweaks so it’s been working ok.

1. The beer page does not show the beer style - This has been added now.
2. The thumbnails are hardly legible - We have added a setting to let you choose small, medium or large images in the list view.
3. Auto-compress pictures? Loading time is quite long - These are already heavily compressed and optimised (AVIF format is used if the device supports it, JPG/PNG if not). The compression happens on the very first load of an image (by anyone). The slow loading that you’re seeing is actually you being the first to load that image at that size, and you’re having to wait for the compression to occur (rather than it taking a while to transfer the large non-compressed data to your device). The compressed version is then saved and so everyone else loading that image after you will see it lightning fast. We realise this could be improved slightly, but for the simplicity this provides us, we felt a single slow load time for one person once was an acceptable trade-off.

Again, thanks for all the feedback and helping us make the new trade store even better!