Drill Down / Custom Search Field speed

blackey wrote: I'd like to have a category with several thousand products [..]

This is currently a feature limitation. The feature (Drill Down Navigation) does not perform well when you have a large amount of products assigned to a category that uses Custom Search Fields for Drill Down Navigation.

We are aware of this limitation, but there is no easy or quick fix. We've tried many different ways to improve performance, but have not yet found a better way to go than what we are doing today.

At this time, use categories to bring people to a sub-category that contains hundreds, not thousands of items, then allow them to use Drill Down Navigation to narrow down their search.

Otherwise, bring customers to the advanced search page (you could customize the look of that page to make Custom Search Fields more prominent there, for example).

In the future, we'll look at ways to make things faster.

Is there a way to set up a filter for an individual product that has custom fields? For example, we sell widgets, and there are number of variables filter levels to get to a product. Essentially I'd like take the search fields option at the bottom of search.asp and put it on a product page for a particular product. Thank you.

Hamish, thank you for your reply. What I am trying to replicate is something like what I have here: http://www.fastcap.com/builder/partnumberbuilder.asp. The main addition would be that I would need to have a button to buy the product after the filters have been applied. Currently that sample page is from our old site and exist from a separate database from the store. However, I have already used Custom Search Fields in our store, so I would think that it should be possible to replicate something similar within the store.