I recently spent a few months buying a new sectional sofa. Boy is the interface for that process terrible. The experience went something like this:

1. Pick the overall style

2. Find vendors that make that style

3. Physically drive to far-away stores to get a sense for what our “comfort” KPIs are in terms of seat depth/height, back height, cushion fill, etc.

4. Go back online, manually compile a table of the above parameters across vendors, mainly pulling from PDF brochures with incomplete or incompatible information. Down filter to a few main candidates that satisfy major comfort and aesthetic objectives.

5. Take room measurements to understand constraints on configuration

6. With narrowed candidates, again manually compile available sectional piece options to determine the configuration that best fits our room.

7. Down to 2-3 options, go back to physical stores to test comfort (if they weren’t part of first round) and evaluate fabrics and finishes.

8. Final discussions, including considerations about price comp and lead times (varied from 2-6 months!). Finally make purchase.

Maybe this is a little off-topic. But the point is this process was ultimately a couple of nested Sort/Filter operations, once the data was structured in a format relevant to our decision. That’s the biggest problem with online shopping - most of the data relevant to decisions is unstructured or unmeasurable. Once you get through that, then yes, filters are almost always the goal. I don’t really care about your fancy UI - I just want the information relevant to me in a spreadsheet so I can do a nested Sort.