How do I set up custom categories and filters in my online store?
Standard e-commerce templates often lock stores into a single "shop all" view without clear drop-down menus or category filters. This makes it difficult to organize diverse items like pickup-only pieces, forcing sellers to rely solely on item descriptions and leaving shoppers unable to easily browse by collection.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Map out category and attribute structures on paper before selecting a website builder to avoid retrofitting issues later.Did this help you?
- 2Putting pickup-only information directly into the item descriptionDid this help you?
- 3Relying on community comments or forum replies for step-by-step navigation and settings instructionsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“It felt like there wasn't enough customization for what I wanted and I couldn't separate things into the categories I needed to easily.”source ↗
“I'm hitting a wall with trying to figure out certain features like pickup only, and categories”source ↗
“I put the products into collections, but I can't get past "shop all" and I can't figure out how to let people filter products by category/collection, or how to make a drop-down for people to pick a category to browse.”source ↗
“some of the pieces are pick up only, but I can't figure out how to indicate that other than putting it in the item description”source ↗
“some text disappears (like the text in "sort by") because it seems to be white on white, and you can only see what's there when you hover over it. No idea how to fix this”source ↗
Where this came up
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