Hi Rob,
I’m quite new to wordpress too. I’ve been using WooCommerce for a few ecommerce sites and I’ve found it quite flexible and easy to use. I don’t know if it will meet all your requirements, but there are a lot of plugins you can add on to specialise your site.
Also in WooCommerce you can add product tags and then place these in the side bar as a search filter.
That might be generic to all e-commerce platforms, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve only used this one!
Hope that helps
Dawn