I've built a few eCommerce sites in my time, and one thing I know is that if you ask 5 people to use the site, they will generally shop one of 5 different ways: by category, by impulse, by search, by brand or by price. I spent Friday implement the algorithms and design for the Shop by Price panel in StoreSuite.

So, how does the Shop by Price panel work exactly? First up, it's contextually relevant: it will only appear when you are browsing the category pages. The prices are generated using an algorithm that calculates the price spread for a category. Basically the lowest and highest price in that category are worked out, a spread is created and prices are grouped into 5 ranges, like this:



When you click on a price range, you will simply see a list of products in that category filtered by price, like so:



As you can see, you can also sort the products using the Sort by dropdown, so I could filter by price and then sort by average customer rating, for example. This gives the shopper ultimate power over the way they view products in a category, which is what having a usable eCommerce site is all about.

I think when building a product like StoreSuite it's really important not to make assumptions as to how someone will use the product - you should provide as many options presented in the most usable way; sort and filter options shouldn't stand out, but they should be easy to find when they are needed.

Shop by price only works when prices are distributed over a certain range, and thus if the products in a category don't have a large enough price differential the Shop by Price panel is automatically hidden.

Do you shop by price when you're buying online? If you were to implement StoreSuite do you think this feature would help you make more sales? We will be setting up a few real online shops powered by StoreSuite when it's ready for beta and one of them will be selling computer peripherals. I think shopping by price would be extremely useful.

Your thoughts?