Landscapers Direct

Development Ecommerce

B2B Shopify, Equipment & Parts

The Situation

Landscapers Direct serves a professional audience that knows exactly what it needs: efficient filtering, precise specifications, and reliable stock information. Their new Shopify store needed to support thousands of SKUs across complex product hierarchies for three unique brands, but the out-of-the-box platform features were not designed for this level of complexity. Three problems showed up over and over:

Filters served up options that didn’t apply, sending shoppers to dead-end results.
No way to pick a single part off an assembly diagram and drop it straight into the cart.
Stock numbers on the site didn’t match what was actually on the warehouse shelves.

If executed poorly, we knew users would drop off early, right where they were trying to find a product. Buyers who knew exactly what they wanted and couldn’t get to it fast enough would leave and never come back. The brief was simple: make finding and buying the right part as direct as possible.

The Solution

1. Smart Attribute Filter with Dependent Options

We threw out the stock Shopify filter and built a custom engine in its place. It works in layers: pick a brand and the model list narrows to match, pick a model and you only see parts that actually fit. Every option on screen makes sense for the one chosen before it.

Key capabilities:

As many filter attributes and values as the catalog needs, with no slowdown.
Filter selections stick as shoppers move around the site and click back.
Type-ahead search inside the filter, so buyers can start typing a value and jump right to it.

2. Layered Navigation Post-Processing

A good filter still trips people up if it lets them pick combinations that return nothing. So, we added a layer that reads the current selections and grays out any option that would land on zero results.

We added a couple of things on top:

Inline help links next to the technical or unusual attributes, so buyers get context without leaving the page.
Visual cues that make selected, available, and disabled options easy to tell apart at a glance.

3. Assembly Viewer Widget

Ordering a replacement part usually means holding a parts diagram in one hand and a list of part numbers in the other, matching them up by eye. It’s slow, and it’s easy to get wrong. Our assembly viewer gets rid of that step.

What it does:

Zoomable diagrams with smooth pinch and scroll, down to the small parts.
A clickable hotspot on every labeled part in the diagram.
Add to cart straight from the hotspot, so the buyer never loses their place in the diagram.

4. Inventory Sync with a Custom Source

Landscapers Direct runs stock out of their own warehouse system, which lives outside Shopify. With nothing connecting the two, the numbers on the site could trail reality by hours. That means overselling, then the awkward cancellation email.

We built a real-time integration that pulls the live counts from their warehouse system and feeds them into Shopify continuously. By the time a buyer is ready to check out, the number on the page is the real one.

5. Contextual Breadcrumb Navigation

Out of the box, Shopify breadcrumbs follow a fixed hierarchy, not the route the shopper actually took. A buyer who landed on a product from a seasonal promo or a filtered collection would get a breadcrumb pointing somewhere unrelated.

We rewrote the breadcrumb logic to track the collection a shopper came from and show that as the path back, one they can actually click. Now the navigation holds up no matter how someone reached the page.

6. Filter Pagination and In-Panel Search

Some categories carry a huge number of variants: model series, serial-number ranges, individual serial numbers, assembly types. In those, a standard filter panel either cuts the list short or loads so slowly that buyers give up before they pick anything.

We added paged loading and a search box to every large filter group. The panel opens fast no matter how many options sit behind it, and a buyer can type to cut the longest list down in seconds.

Feature Summary

Feature	What was done	Business impact
Smart attribute filter	Custom filter engine with layered, dependent options, unlimited attributes, saved state, and type-ahead search.	Buyers land on the right product fast, even in a catalog with hundreds of specs.
Layered navigation post-processing	Logic that disables incompatible options, heads off zero-result dead ends, and adds help links next to the tricky attributes.	Filtering that guides buyers toward what’s available instead of blocking them.
Assembly viewer widget	An interactive diagram viewer with zoomable images, clickable part hotspots, and add-to-cart from any hotspot.	Buyers order the exact part straight from the diagram, no guesswork.
Inventory sync	Real-time stock sync between Shopify and the client’s own inventory system.	Stock counts stay accurate, so no overselling and no let-down customers.
Contextual breadcrumbs	Breadcrumbs that reflect the collection a shopper came from, not a fixed default path.	Shoppers know where they are and get back to where they were in one click.
Filter pagination & search	In-panel search and pagination for filter groups holding hundreds of values.	Filter panels load fast and stay usable in the biggest categories.

Outcome

Each of these customizations fixed a real point of friction in how people buy. Together, they turn a general-purpose store into a tool built for buyers who have no patience for a clumsy search.

Now, a buyer who knows their specs can find the exact part through filtering that holds up, confirm it on the assembly diagram, check live stock, and place the order. No leaving the product page. No phone call.

What Landscapers Direct ended up with is a store that fits how its trade customers actually work, plus a build that scales with the catalog instead of piling up technical debt.

Running into the same friction on your Shopify store? Get in touch and tell us what’s breaking.

Smart Attribute Filter with Dependent Options