Boat owners do not shop by boat. They shop by engine. A 250 HP Verado and a 150 HP Verado are the same engine family and different parts lists, and the horsepower rating is the filter that decides it. ViewForge ships Year / Make / Engine / HP as the marine default.
HP as a first-class filter. Free to 50 products. Template 04: Year / Make / Engine / HP — 2019 › Mercury › Verado › 250 HP.
A shopper looking for an impeller does not think about their boat — they think about the engine bolted to the back of it. Make and engine family get them most of the way; horsepower finishes the job. Automotive schemas assume the vehicle is the unit of fitment, which is why they leave marine merchants stuffing "Verado 250" into a Model field and losing the ability to filter on the rating separately.
Mercury Verado spans a wide range of ratings, and the parts lists diverge across it. A 250 HP part is not a 150 HP part, even though both engines carry the same family name and the same year. Putting HP in the fourth cascading dimension means the storefront filter can express the distinction the catalog actually turns on, rather than showing a shopper everything Verado and hoping they read the fine print.
Most marine retailers carry both, and the temptation is to run two separate filters or two collections. You do not need to. The same four dimensions cover Mercury, Yamaha, Volvo Penta, Mercruiser, Suzuki, Honda across outboard and inboard, because Make and Engine are free-text slots rather than entries in a vehicle database somebody else maintains. Add a brand the day you start carrying it.
Marine model years slip, get superseded, and get labelled inconsistently between suppliers. That means fitment maintenance, not a one-time import. Starter’s coverage dashboard shows which SKUs still have no fitment attached, and fuzzy matching stops a second supplier’s spelling from creating a duplicate dropdown entry. The data lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so corrections are yours to make and yours to keep.
A typical marine retailer lands on Starter or Professional. VIN decode and ACES/PIES are automotive features — there is no reason for a marine store to pay Premium unless the catalog exceeds 5,000 products carrying fitment.
Install freeOne with somewhere to put horsepower. Marine fitment needs Year, Make, Engine family and HP rating, and most YMM apps offer three levels plus a trim field built for cars. ViewForge ships a marine template with exactly Year / Make / Engine / HP, lets you rename any of the four, and stores fitment as Shopify metaobjects so it stays in your store when you cancel.
Yes, in the same catalog and the same filter. The Engine slot accepts any engine model — Mercury Verado, Yamaha F-series, Volvo Penta, Mercruiser, Suzuki, Honda BF-series — because it is a free-text dimension rather than a lookup into a vehicle database. The HP slot then separates the ratings within a family. You do not need separate collections or a second app for inboards.
Because it is what decides fitment. A 250 HP Verado and a 150 HP Verado share a make, a family name and often a model year, and their parts lists differ. If the rating is buried in a model string, the storefront filter cannot act on it and the shopper has to read listing text to work out whether a part applies. Giving HP its own cascading level moves that decision into the filter, before anything is added to a cart.
The Starter tier includes a coverage dashboard that shows which products still carry no fitment, and fuzzy matching on import that flags near-duplicate values before they create a second dropdown entry. Because fitment is stored as Shopify metaobjects in your own store, corrections and bulk edits stay with you — you are not filing a support request with a vendor to fix your own catalog.
Free up to 50 products with fitment. $19/month Starter for 1,000 products with CSV import, custom dimension labels, fuzzy matching and the coverage dashboard. $49/month Professional for 5,000 products plus Smart Parse extraction from existing descriptions. $240/month Premium for unlimited products — worth it only if your fitment catalog is genuinely that large, since VIN decode and ACES/PIES are automotive formats.
Marine fitment hangs on the horsepower rating, and most YMM apps have nowhere to put it. ViewForge’s marine template puts HP in the fourth slot by default, so a part attached to a 250 HP Verado never surfaces for somebody running a 150. see ViewForge →