Narrowing By Category Filter after Searching is Off The Rails

[ColsCreations]

I put [“thin blue line” mug] into search and gotthis page showing 720 results.

It was mostly showing travel mugs but I wanted coffee mugs so OK, I used the “refine by category” to narrow it to coffee mugs.

and that gave methis page with just 10 fewer results and still mostly travel mugs even though travel mugs are a different category.

So then I clicked on the top left square for Shop by Category –> Coffee Mugs and got this page which instead of taking me to just coffee mugs takes me all the way back out to general MP results of almost 18,000 products, leaving me farther away from coffee mugs than I was when I started my search.

 And then from there, if I try to use the “refine by category” to narrow it back down, nothing happens.

No matter which category I choose from the drop-down, nothing happens, the page doesn’t change, I still have the 17,833 results, no sub categories open in the menu …  Same thing if I chose one of the “Shop by Category” squares at top of page. Nothing happens, just stuck in a loop of getting this same page I can’t filter down.

Not a one-time glitch as I have been trying this search & filtering since yesterday, sometimes with different keyword terms + mug, and same problems.  [“happy birthday” mug] is really bad. Using that as the search criteria, the first seven pages of 11,950 results are all cards. It’s not until page 8 you start seeing some mugs at the bottom but here again they are all travel mugs. If you use the “refine by category” drop-down to choose coffee mugs, you get 10,804 results of mostly travel mugs again. If from there you use the drop-down to choose coffee mugs again, you get this page with over 630K results and if you click the “refine by category” filter you see you have somehow been transported to Invitations & Stationary.

I’m sorry this is so long but I am trying to be as clear & specific as possible about the steps I am taking in trying to search for / navigate to a specific product type and how they are leading to dead ends, loops, the wrong product type, and more products than if i hadn’t used the category filters at all.

[Mark]

Hi @ColsCreations ,

Thanks for going to so much effort to flag this issue.

I think the " in your search term may be effecting the results, but I have checked in with the team to see for certain. When I search without the " I seem to get better results. Once I have an update, I will let you know.

[Caprice]

Sometimes I think it’s tags that confuse the issue?  For example - let’s say I design a travel mug - and use “travel” as a tag.  If I transfer that design to a regular coffee mug and don’t double check the tags; it’s still there, right?  Does that cause items to show in the wrong place in the MP?

[ColsCreations]

Huh, yep, it’s the quotation marks. Did the same searches without them tonight and the filters behaved as expected. I’m used to always using quotes when I want an exact phrase and maybe searches are getting smarter and don’t need them as much anymore but if you Google it there are literally thousands of webpages advising people to use quotes for exact phrase searching across all kinds of platforms so thank you for giving this your attention as I’m likely not the only one to be thrown so far off base by using quotes here. 

[ColsCreations]

Yes, if you’re typing in search terms you can get unexpected results based on tags people used. But to my thinking, if you are using the category filters Zazzle provides to narrow things down to a specific product type, it should be using its own internal database structuring to return just that product type regardless of what has been added to the metadata by the Creator.