Improving Faceted Navigation Through Faster, Easier Management

Facets play a critical role in how shoppers navigate large catalogs. They act as filters that help shoppers narrow down results, compare products, and move faster from exploration to decision. Yet for many merchants, facet management has long been one of the most frustrating parts of search and category merchandising.

Too rigid. Too technical. Too dependent on frontend work.
And often too slow to adapt to how assortments and shopper expectations evolve.

Facet Manager was built to change that.

Why facet management matters in product discovery

Search results pages and category pages are key decision surfaces in the shopping journey. The way facets are displayed, ordered, grouped, or hidden has a direct impact on discoverability, relevance, and conversion.

When facets are poorly managed, shoppers are faced with long, confusing lists of options that add friction instead of clarity. Navigating filters becomes work instead of help.

But when facets are well managed, they naturally guide shoppers to the right products, helping them refine their choices without having to think.

The challenge is that most facet tooling makes optimization difficult. Changes often require code. Results take time to appear. And managing facets consistently across search results pages and category pages becomes a manual and time-consuming process for merchandising and search teams.

What Nosto Facet Manager changes for merchandising and search teams

Gives you back control over facets, at any scale

Facet Manager is an enhanced facet management capability available directly within Nosto Search and Category Merchandising.

It gives merchandisers and search teams direct control over facets, without relying on developers or waiting for re-indexing. All configuration is handled directly from the admin UI, making it easy to adjust how facet groups and values appear across search results pages and category pages. Changes are applied instantly, allowing teams to react faster to seasonal changes, assortment updates, and shifting business priorities.

Facet Manager is also built to make facet optimization sustainable at scale, even for large and complex catalogs. Blank values are ignored by default, reducing unnecessary cleanup work. Facets that apply to 100% of products and add no value can be hidden automatically, helping teams avoid maintaining filters that don’t improve discovery.

Together, these improvements bring facet optimization back into the hands of the teams who manage product discovery every day, while reducing operational overhead and allowing them to focus on meaningful improvements instead of continuous maintenance.

Enables better shopping experiences

Facet Manager goes beyond basic configuration. It allows merchants to actively shape how facets contribute to the shopping experience.

With Facet Manager, merchants can:

• Merge facet values to reduce fragmentation and noise
  Variations such as “Slim”, “Slim fit”, “Slim-fit”, and “Fitted” can be merged into a single, clear value like “Slim fit”, instead of appearing as multiple options that dilute relevance.
• Edit facet display names to match the language shoppers use.
  This helps align internal product data with customer-facing terminology, making search and browse more intuitive.
• Pin and reorder facet values to surface what matters most
  Merchants can manually prioritize values, whether they’re the most important or the most frequently used, so they appear first instead of being buried in long lists.
• Add visual elements such as color swatches or imagery
  This is especially valuable in beauty, where visual cues help shoppers quickly understand shades or variations without relying on text alone.
• Pin or hide facet groups based on category or search query
  On a beauty site, a foundation category page might highlight facets such as skin type or coverage, while hiding less relevant facets that would only add clutter and distract shoppers.

The result is a cleaner interface, clearer choices, and a smoother customer experience across search results pages and category pages.

Maximizes efficiency with AI-powered facet suggestions

Facet Manager also includes AI facet suggestions from Huginn, Nosto’s central AI agent for commerce experiences.

Huginn analyzes how facets are structured and used, and highlights potential opportunities to improve facet navigation. These suggestions help teams spot issues and optimization ideas that are easy to miss when managing large or complex catalogs.

Suggestions are generated on a weekly basis and can include opportunities such as merging fragmented facet values or correcting typos or inconsistencies in facet names.

Each suggestion can be reviewed directly in the admin UI. Merchants stay fully in control and can apply, adjust, or ignore suggestions based on their business priorities.

By combining manual control with AI-driven suggestions, Facet Manager helps teams continuously optimize facets efficiently and keep discovery experiences consistently relevant across search results pages and category pages.

Centralises facet management across search and category pages

Facet Manager brings facet management for search and category pages into a single, dedicated experience.

This unified approach reduces duplication of effort and helps teams maintain consistency across all product listing pages. Facet strategies no longer need to be managed separately, making optimization easier to scale and less error-prone.

See Facet Manager in action

Get started with Nosto Facet Manager

If you’re already using Nosto Search or Category Merchandising, Facet Manager is available directly in the admin UI. Start optimizing facets right away.

If you’re a Nosto customer but not yet using Search or Category Merchandising, book a demo to see how Facet Manager can help you take control of facets and improve discovery across your site.

If you’re new to Nosto and looking for a better way to manage facets across search and category pages without the usual technical overhead, book a demo to learn how we can help.