 Enhancing User Experience  Why it is important?  Discussing user experience one-by-one

 Allowing customers to search our product catalog effectively  Enhancing this search by allowing our customers to filter products  Providing wish lists for our customers  Generating recommendations for customers based on previous purchases  Informing customers when their desired products are back in stock  Enabling social aspects such as product ratings and reviews from customers

 Find out popular and wanted products  Analyze customer trends  Planning e-commerce products  Customers know merits and demerits of any products  Helps to increases revenue and sales  Improves customer satisfaction To enhance customer experience facilitate customers as more as you can

 Search and filter products is vital in framework  Why?  If they cannot fid what they are looking for ▪ Customer will be frustrated by our site ▪ Go somewhere where they can fid what they are looking for much more easily  There are two methods of search  Keyword Search: search based on keywords  Filtering: Search based on listing product attributes

Based on Keywords Applies all metadata and complex algorithms to the search More complex, because you have to rank the best results first No matter how data model is? Answers to 20% of users needs to find

Based on product multiple attributes Filter criteria should correlate with the data model. Known as Advance Search Answers to 80% of users needs to find

 Easy way is to search the keywords from product name and product description fields  To make the results more relevant  We can place different priorities ▪ Result is more valid if keyword is in both fields ▪ Is also valid if keyword is in name field ▪ Least valid is if keyword is in description field  We need following 3-things  Search Box: to type keyword to search  Search Feature in Controller: code for searching  Search Result: template for viewing search results

Mytasks.net Mytasks.net/view Mytasks.net/search Mytasks.net/someelse

 Working of search function is as given:  Customer has actually entered some phrase to search  Clean the search phrase  Run the query from database  Name and Description is checked with search phrase  Show priorities results  SearchFunction.php SearchFunction.php

 We can improve our search result by changing our search template

 Filtering allow customers to better find the products they are looking for  Filtering products are based on product attributes  Like price ranges, manufacturer, weight, brands etc.  Price range filtering is simple enough  But with product attributes, we would need  To extend the database and models to maintain this additional information

 There are different ways in which we can store filtered results:  In the user's session: This will be lost when the user closes their browser  In a cookie: This information will stay when the user closes their browser  In the URL: This would allow the customer to filter results and send the link of those results to a friend  In POST data: The information will only be stored for the one instance the filter is used

 We are trying URL method  We format filter data within the URL as  filter/attribute-type/attribute-value-ID  For example for two attributes, URL can be:  Domain.com/filter/price/5/filter/weight/6  How it will work?  we can simply iterate through the bits of the URL  find bits containing filter  then take the next two parts of the URL  Filter down(query to DB) the product based on parts

 We need three new tables to for effective product filtering  An attribute types table:  To manage types of attributes; for example, price, weight, brand, manufacturer, color, and so on  An attribute values table  To manage values and ranges of attributes; for example, <$5, $5 - $10,<5 KG, Nike, Adidas, gold, red, and so on  An associations table  To associate products with attribute values

 This table will have only two fields  Product ID and Attribute ID

 To enable Filtering in framework we need to  Build a list of attributes  Build suitable URLs based on the attributes  Display them within the product list view  We need nested loops  One for generating headings and empty lists  2 nd to insert the loops of values into these lists

 Step-by-step process for filtering options  We query the database for attribute types  We cache the results of this query  The cache is associated with a template tag ▪ Building empty list and showing on template  We query the database for all attribute types  We iterate through the results, putting each value into an array for its corresponding attribute type  For each attribute type, we cache the array, and assign it to a template tag

 Displaying the number of products matching a filter next to it  Pagination—limiting the number of products displayed on a page  Filter options with no matching products could be hidden