Guided Selling vs Filters: Which Helps Shoppers Buy?

Filters and guided questions both help shoppers narrow a catalogue down to something they'll buy. They work for different shoppers. Filters serve people who already know what they want; guided questions serve the ones who don't. Most stores need both, in different places. This is part of our guide to asking before you sell.

Two kinds of shopper

Picture two people landing on the same category page of an outdoor store.

The first knows exactly what she wants: a waterproof jacket, women's size M, under $200, in dark green. She wants to tick four boxes and see six jackets.

The second has been told he needs "a proper jacket" for a hiking trip in Scotland next month. He doesn't know what "waterproof rating" means, whether he needs insulation, or why some jackets cost three times more than others. A panel of 40 checkboxes doesn't help him. It tells him he should already know the answers.

Filters are built for the first shopper. Guided selling is built for the second. The mistake is to serve only one of them.

Filters answer "show me what I asked for"; guided questions answer "tell me what I need".

Filters: what they do well

Filters are fast and transparent. The shopper sees every option, keeps control and changes their mind in a click. For shoppers who know the specs, nothing beats them.

They work best when:

• the shopper knows the attributes that matter (size, colour, brand, price);
• the attributes are simple and shared across products;
• the catalogue is big enough that browsing everything is impossible.

Filters: where they fail

Filters assume the shopper speaks the store's language. "Hydrostatic head", "GSM" and "drop" are clear to experts and meaningless to everyone else.

They're also hard to get right. Baymard Institute, which tests e-commerce sites with real users, found in its 2015 benchmark of 50 major US e-commerce sites that only 16% offered a reasonably good filtering experience. In its usability tests, 40% of participants were at some point unable to find a site's filtering options at all (Baymard Institute, via Smashing Magazine). The study is old, but the lesson holds: filters only help shoppers who find them and understand them.

The deeper limit is that filters can't help with a decision the shopper can't frame. In the same research, when shoppers needed a product compatible with something they owned and the site didn't support that, 65% had to give up or ended up buying something they wrongly believed was compatible. A filter can only narrow by what the shopper knows to ask for.

Filters are excellent at narrowing, and useless when the shopper doesn't know what to narrow by.

Guided questions: what they do well

Guided selling asks about the shopper's situation in plain words, then translates the answers into the attributes. "Where will you wear it? How often does it rain there? Do you get cold easily?" leads to the right jacket without the shopper learning a single spec.

They work best when:

• the right product depends on the shopper's situation, not on a spec they know;
• products differ in ways that are hard to compare in a grid;
• shoppers are buying for someone else, or buying the category for the first time.

They also give a reason. A result that says "You hike in heavy rain, so you need a fully taped, high-rated shell" builds the confidence to buy in a way that a filtered list of 14 jackets doesn't.

Guided questions: where they fail

Questions are slower than filters for anyone who knows what they want. Making an expert answer five questions to reach a product they could have filtered in two clicks is a good way to lose them.

They also hide the full range. A shopper sees one recommendation, or a few, not the 60 alternatives. That's the point for an unsure shopper, and a frustration for a curious one.

And they depend entirely on the questions. A guide that asks things that don't change the answer, or recommends the same bestseller to everyone, loses trust fast. We cover how to write questions that work in guided selling for online stores.

Guided questions are excellent at deciding, and slow for shoppers who've already decided.

Side by side

Neither is better in general; each is better for one kind of shopper.

Use both: who goes where

You don't have to choose. The two do different jobs at different points.

• On the homepage and in ads: a "Help me choose" entry point for people arriving unsure. Cold traffic from ads and social is often in this group.
• On category pages: filters for the people who know, plus a visible link to the guide for those who don't.
• At the end of the guide: send the shopper to a product, a bundle or a filtered category page. For a big catalogue, the guide picks the right corner of the store and the filters take it from there.

That last pattern suits large stores. The guide doesn't need to know all 3,000 products. It needs to know that a beginner hiking in wet weather belongs in "waterproof shells, entry level", and send them to that filtered page.

A funnel tool like Snacked is built for this shape. It sends each shopper to one of up to 8 destinations: products, bundles or category pages, on any website. It doesn't sync your catalogue, so it won't pick between hundreds of individual products; your filters do that once the shopper is in the right place.

Let the guide choose the aisle and let the filters choose the shelf.

How to tell which one your store needs more

Look at your own numbers before you build anything:

• Searches with no results or many reformulations suggest shoppers don't know your words. Guided questions help.
• Heavy use of one or two filters (size, price) suggests shoppers know what they want. Make those filters prominent.
• Lots of category page visits, few product page visits suggests people are stuck choosing. A guide can help.
• Questions to support asking "Which one should I get?" are the clearest sign of all. Your shoppers are already asking for a guide.

Your search logs and support inbox already tell you which shoppers you're losing.

Conclusion

To recap:

• Filters serve shoppers who know what they want; guided questions serve the ones who don't. Most stores have both.
• Filters fail when shoppers don't know the attributes; guided questions fail when shoppers have already decided.
• Combine them: a guide sends unsure shoppers to the right product, bundle or category, and filters finish the job.

For why asking first works, and where it doesn't, read ask before you sell. To check whether the pages your shoppers land on are ready to sell, run one through the free sales page grader.