StoreConnect allows customers to search for products, content articles, and content pages across your store. The search functionality is available in the two locations:
- In the header of each store is global text search that searches across all products, content articles, and content pages.
- When viewing a category (also known as a taxon), customers can toggle filtering options and use text search within that category. Optionally, you can allow filtering by traits, tags, and brands.
When viewing products, customers can also filter by “On Sale” and “In Stock” statuses, as well as by price range (currency or points).
On each page of search results, customers can sort by attributes that are relevant to the results, such as featured status, price, points, name, etc.
Text Search
StoreConnect uses a full-text search engine to search for products, content articles, and content pages.
Some characteristics of full-text search with Store Connect:
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Searches are performed on normalized forms of words, known as lexemes, rather than the exact word. This normalization involves stemming, lowercasing, and sometimes removing stop words.
For example, “nutrition” will find results containing “nutritional” or “nutritionist” due to stemming. But it will not find results only containing “dietary” or “health food” which do not share the same stem or lexeme.
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Ignoring very common words, called “stop words”, such as “and”, “the”, “is”, etc, from the search query.
For example, searching for “the apple pie” will return the same results as searching for “apple pie”.
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Case insensitive search.
For example, searching for “apple pie” will return the same results as searching for “Apple Pie”.
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Quotation marks can be used to find exact phrases.
For example, searching for “apple pie” (including the quotes) will only return results containing the exact phrase “apple pie”, but not “apple tart and pie”.
Indexed Fields for Text Search
The search engine indexes the following objects and a subset of their fields:
Product Text Search
- Display Name / Name
- Product Code
- Slug (the URL-friendly version of the product name)
- Variant titles (e.g., “Small”, “Red”, “Large”)
Product search results page will show master products, though the search results might be matching one or more variants.
Content Article Text Search
- Title
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- Body
- Introduction
- Summary
Body, Introduction, and Summary fields might contain Liquid syntax and when viewed on the store might display different text to different users. The search engine indexes the rendered text for a guest user only. That is, a logged in user might not be able to search for text that is only visible to them.
Content Page Text Search
- Title
- Meta Title
- Meta Keywords
- Meta Description
- Body
The Body field might contain Liquid syntax and when viewed on the store might display different text to different users. The search engine indexes the rendered text for a guest user only. That is, a logged in user might not be able to search for text that is only visible to them.
Filtering products in global search results
StoreConnect limits the available filtering options in the global search results to “On Sale” and “In Stock” statuses, as well as by price range (currency or points).
Filtering products in a category
StoreConnect allows you to filter products in a category by traits, tags, and brands. This is in addition to the “On Sale” and “In Stock” statuses, as well as by price range (currency or points).
Traits
StoreConnect allows you to mark Categories (or Taxons) with Traits, using the Trait, Trait Value, Trait Type, and Trait Category objects.
When viewing a category, the sidebar will display all possible traits for the products in that category. Customers can filter products by selecting one or more trait values.
Categories (Taxons) can have children categories, and the traits of the parent category will be inherited by the child categories. This allows you to set up a hierarchy of traits that can be used to filter products.
For example, if you have catogories like “Clothing” and a child category “Footwear”, and “Clothing” has a trait “Size” with values “Small”, “Medium”, and “Large”, then the “Footwear” category will also have the “Size” trait with the same trait options.
If Traits are not configured for a category, the Traits filter will not be displayed.
Tags
StoreConnect allows you to mark Products with Tags, using the Tag and ProductTag objects.
When viewing a category, the sidebar will display all possible tags for the products in that category. Customers can filter products by selecting one or more tags.
If no Tags are associated with the products in the category, the Tags filter will not be displayed.
Brands
StoreConnect allows you to mark Accounts as Brands by checking the “Is Brand” checkbox in an Account object page. These Accounts will be available as Brands in the Product object page.
StoreConnect allows you to associate each Product with a Account as its brand by selecting the Brand in the Product object page.
StoreConnect allows customers to filter products by Brands within a category search results page.
If no Brands are associated with the products in the category, the Brands filter will not be displayed.
Refreshing Search Index
The StoreConnect search system is optimised for customer search performance, rather than being optimised for showing the most recent changes to the store. The search index is updated periodically, and changes to products, content articles, and content pages might not be immediately reflected in search results.
Different aspects of search system are refreshed on a different schedule:
- The liquid content of Content Articles is converted into plain text, as if viewed by a guest user, once per day.
- The liquid content of Content Pages is converted into plain text, as if viewed by a guest user, once per day.
- The remainder of the search index is refreshed every 3 hours.
Additionally, you can manually refresh the search index by clicking the “Refresh Search Index” button in the Store Connect admin panel. This will refresh the entire search index, including the liquid content of Content Articles and Content Pages.
Please contact StoreConnect support to discuss an alternative schedule for refreshing the search index.