Onion Navigation (Shopify)
Throughout the years we have been working with Shopify, we have done numerous builds for a variety of different merchants and what we have found is we were constantly reinventing the wheel for each project when it came to the Filters on the Collection pages. Our solution worked and through the use of Shopify tags we were able to achieve this functionality but it left a lot for the frontend to accommodate for.
At MindArc we built our own Filter system that is extremely quick and can serve entire collections faster through our Products and Collections index, and allow for filters to be easily retrieved based on the data from the products associated with the collection. This allowed us to streamline our development process but also simplify the tagging process and create a very fast and powerful system for serving your customers collection content with 2 simple calls to the application.
This app also expands on the category system and allows you to link categories with subcategories in an intuitive interface per collection - allowing for your filters to provide the subcategories list for your customers to traverse through deep category linking. To give you an example of how fast this is, we recorded during the time of build that the retrieval of 3000 products took around ~20 seconds through GraphQL for the data required. After implementation and handing back the same data through Onion Navigation, we were able to accomplish 2 seconds for 3000 products retrieved.
So if you're having problems with slow collections pages loading or creating the right filter structure for your customers using your out of the box themes, then Onion Navigation could be the right tool to enhance your storefronts shopping experience.