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Adding a Product Search Function to your Website
The product search feature allows customers to:
- Search for products within all catalogues or within a particular catalogue
- Enter keywords to search a product name or product code
- Search and specify a price range for the products
- Sort the results in a number of sorting options available
The search functionality can be added to any web page. Ideally you may want to add this to your online shops overall template so as customers browse the catalogues they can just easily search for products.
Specifying the Web Page to display search results on
By default, the search results for a product search module are displayed on the same web page where the search module was inserted. You will notice {module_productresults} appended below the product search form. However you can customize and have the search results appear on a different web page. If you add the module to a template, then you must customize the form to specify the web page to display the results on.
To customize, add your product search form to any web page and go into the HTML view. Locate the opening <form> with this action URL:
action="/Default.aspx?A=ProductSearch&PageID={module_oid}"
Replace PageID={module_oid} with ID=URL of your results page. Your web page URL must start with a slash (/).
Example:
action="/Default.aspx?A=ProductSearch&ID=/Results.htm">
Editing Price Range Criteria
When the form is inserted into a page it will include a default set of price ranges that customers can search through. But you can easily change this to suite your online shop. After adding the form to a web page, go into the HTML view and locate:
<select class="cat_dropdown_small" id="CAT_ProductPrice" name="CAT_ProductPrice" >
<option value="-1,-1">Any Price</option>
<option value="0,50">$0-$50</option>
<option value="51,100">$51-$100</option>
<option value="101,150">$101-$150</option>
<option value="151,200">$151-$200</option>
<option value="201,300">$201-$300</option>
<option value="301,-1">Over $300</option>
</select>
Simply use the same format as above but change the prices to suite your needs.
Sorting of Results
When you customize your online shop you can specify the sort type in which products appear in. These are the sort types available:
- Weighting – Your own custom order. Products will be sorted according to weight if they have a number in the weight field
- Alphabetical - This is the default sort
- Date – Newest Products first
- Price – Least price first
Note: The Product Search module is different to the website Search module. You can find the former module under Module manager where the latter is found under the Modules -> Site Search.
Customizing Product Search Results Module
Similarly to the product and catalogue list modules discussed below the product search results module can be customized.
When you first insert this module onto a web page it will appear as:
{module_productresults}
This module can take the following inputs:
{module_productresults, rowLength, targetFrame, resultsPerPage}
rowLength - Number of products per row
targetFrame - e.g. _blank. Specify the frame you want the product to open in
resultsPerPage - Number of products per page
Example:
{module_ productresults,4,,12}
Customising the search criteria
The product search has a couple of different searching modes which you can take advantage of.....however by default only the product name is searched for the best results.
You can configure the Product Search in the following ways:
- Product Name only
- Product Name, Description and Tags
To configure the product search form to search everything simply alter the Action URL of the form from:
action="/Default.aspx?A=ProductSearch..."
to
action="/Default.aspx?A=ProductSearch...&SE=True"
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