Search and Navigation Implementation Considerations
Guidelines and requirements you may want to consider as you implement search and navigation throughout your storefront.
Requirements Phase
Identify how many types of search are required for the solution. For example, do you want different behavior or presentation for different categories: top sellers versus clearance items or for content assets versus products?
Paging logic:
- Determine which pages show search results.
- Determine how many search results to show per page.
- Determine what happens when:
- No search results are defined for a category or product
- Less than the planned number of search results are defined for a category or product. For example, you want to redirect a search to a category page or another page to provide the user with more results.
- More than the planned number of search results are defined for a category or product. For example, you want the customer to be able to refine their search.
Sorting and ranking logic:
- Determine how many ways a customer might want to sort results
- Determine whether you want to promote specific products through search
- Determine what happens when:
- Multiple sorts are applied in a specific order
- Ranking logic is applied to reposition results after sorting
Indexing attributes:
- Identify what additional information is required for indexing, so that customers can search on it. Every attribute that is needed for indexing must be marked as searchable.
- Identify required search features,
including:
- Category placement
- Search placement
- Search rank
- Text relevance boosting
Maintaining indexes:
- Identify how data for indexes will be maintained (for example,
import, manual, programmatic, or other):
- During development
- When the site is live
- If the merchant plans to manually create
search indexes in the Business Manager, identify:
- Who will be responsible for creating them
- If there will be a review process
- How they are tested
- How search indexes are replicated with catalog data
If the merchant plans to import search index definitions, define the import process. If possible, implement it as a job within Salesforce B2C Commerce, so that you can take advantage of the scheduling and notification functionality built into B2C Commerce. If you intend to perform regular index updates, these can also be scheduled in Business Manager.
Design Phase
Operational Overhead
During the design phase, merchants should consider the day-to-day operational overhead associated with creating and maintaining search indexes manually within B2C Commerce, especially merchants with large product catalogs. This process includes examining current customer searches, identifying needed changes, configuring dictionaries and indexes, and manually building and replicating indexes.
Build Phase
Build code to support search requirements.
Development/Test Phase
To facilitate development and testing, you must:
- Create users with permissions that are in line with merchant-defined business processes.
- Create an initial set of test search results.
- Use a test plan to ensure that all use cases are reviewed, including current Storefront searches, if known.
- Test the import process, if applicable.
Best Practices
Salesforce recommends the following best practices:
- Show all variations for sale; don't attempt to narrow the results by variation using scripts to process search results. For example, if color is a slicing attribute, show all iPods in all colors, don't attempt to iterate over the results to pull out only pink iPods via scripts. While this can be done, it requires post-processing of the full result set, which can impact the search performance. Instead, it's recommended that you add a search refinement that lets the customer drill down a specific selection.
- Any result processing that requires that you iterate through all the results can make search a lot slower.
- Be careful when applying text relevance boosting. Because this feature is site wide, it can have unexpected consequences if not applied with the full search set in mind.
- Make sure that scheduled indexing is disabled when you replicate index information from staging to production.
Performance Recommendations
If you have a large catalog of products and you want to improve the speed of search, try to make the size of your indexes smaller. You can see the size of an index after it's built on the Search >Search Indexes page. Usually, the number of attributes being indexed is what determines index size. You can also add stop words to decrease the size of the index.
However, if you decrease the number of searchable attributes, this means that the search results might be less accurate.
If you have an average size catalog of products, decreasing index size isn't normally a concern.
Testing Recommendations
We recommend testing the top 50–100 searches on your site as a baseline to make sure that the search results are returned in the order that you prefer.