I'm fairly new to this as I've inherited a website running ecommercetemplates from a business we purchased. So forgive me for my novice questions.

I have a webstore that caters to a narrow automotive customer (approximately 10 years of a particular muscle car brand). We currently have 5800 products active on our store. I'd like to setup a sidebar filter that would allow the customer to filter products based on their year and model. From my research it looks like my best option is to setup attributes for every product to tell the database what years and exact models each product fits. I'm not expecting the filter to work like rockauto, where you select year, then make, then model. But it would be a basic version where the customer could narrow his results to just a particular year or model.

Is there an alternative way to do this that i'm not seeing?
And is it possible to make the side filter "sticky" so it follows them on each category until they clear the filter options?

Also, it would be quite cumbersome to assign multiple attributes to 5800 products through the GUI of vsadmin. Is there a way to assign attributes with a csv file?

Thank you in advance for your input.

Hi Challenger_Jeff
You can't set the attributes via a CSV file but there is a process to add attributes to hundreds of products with a few clicks. What you do is first, create your attributes. Then go to the admin products page and list the products. Then on the left in the "Quick Entry..." choose "Product Attributes" and your attributes should appear and you can add them to products just by checking the checkboxes, or use the "Check All" to check whole pages of products at a time.

The first Attribute Group you create (with ID of zero) is normally called the Manufacturer but it can be anything you like really. This first group is treated in a slightly more efficient way so should be the major grouping for your products. In most cases this is the Manufacturer but in your case (if they are all the same manufacturer) you may want to set it to something else, like the year for instance.

Vince

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