Compare Desk
Don't let your customers lose themselves in a variety of products you have to offer.
Would you agree that product comparison is an integral part of modern shopping cart? Had you ever had yourself to choose from different products? Then this feeling of having many opened tabs and switching between them to read the product differences should be awkwardly familiar to you.
With Compare Desk you can be assured that this issue will be solved and in a most efficeint way.
You may ask: "Why? What could be so special about product comparison extension?". Then read on.
Compatibility
First and foremost is compatibility. Compare Desk will work on any modern version of Joomla, that is and
You can compare products of the following shopping carts:
Parameters
Compare Desk is based on parameters managed by Fast Seller. Fast Seller is a filter manager component that is used to create and assign filters to products. Compare Desk leverages this opportunity and uses already created filters/parameters to provide comparison options out of the box.
Those who prefer HikaShop and use Cherry Picker complete bundle should already have access to Fast Seller.
Virtuemart users, those who use Cherry Picker Product Types version should have acces to it too.
Panel
The first thing to interact with customers will be the Panel that displays products added for comparison.
You can specify a maximum amount of products a customer can add for comparison.
Compare Desk offers two types of Panel you can choose from:
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Horizontal product icons view which is called literally Panel. It provides an ability to remove products by clicking on their icons.
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Vertical list of products. It too allows you to directly remove or view the products.
Panels are implemented as separate installable Joomla modules. This means you can simply publish a module to any position on your site you want the Panel to be displayed in.
High versatility even allows you to have two types of Panels working at the same time side by side.
Layout
Out of the box Compare Desk provides two comparison page layouts. Layouts are easily overridable via Joomla template overrides and are highly customizable.
Uniqe parameters
When you compare products Compare Desk will automatically collapse empty parameter rows for better user experience.
In addition to that Compare Desk also offers a switch to dynamically show only unique parameters among products.
Return to products
This may seem like a subtle feature but don't underestimate its importance.
Compare Desk will track the last visited category and show a link to return back to products.
However if the link for comparison page is bookmarked and opened later or a visitor sends it via email to someone else a session variable that leads back to products is effectively lost. In this case Compare Desk will infer from the current products and show a new "Add similar products" link, thus improving the UX and raising conversion.
Product Rating
Compare Desk can display product ratings with a link to product reviews, if available.
To make you choices harder these too are configurable:
More features
- Compare Desk is made 99.9% configurable throught back-end with no need to apply any hacks to core files. The only natural need is to embed "Add to compare" checkbox itself into the product form. This is acheived through template override and we have a detailed description to guide you through this.
- Add to cart button can be configured either to stay on comparison page or proceed to Checkout.
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Through Compare Desk back-end you can easily choose which parameters to show during comparison and rearragne them by dragging directly with your mouse.
- All products you add to compare remain in session. This means you can freely navigate between pages and be sure previously selected products will not disappear.
Live example
We have a dedicated set-up where you can fully explore Compare Desk functionality.