Search extensions or fixes
Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2023 12:22 am
Hello,
This has become my least favorite thing about Opencart. I really like opencart but what I see when I look at customer search report, is a lot of possible lost sales because of having to get the built in search to work well enough to give good results.
Let me give an example. I sell stuff that has different bolt / thread sizes. So they can have 3/8 x 10, 5/16 x 14, etc. Those are options and lets say they are product model "A".
If you do a search for 3/8 x 10 since it is an option it doesn't find product A.
If you have 3/8 x 10 in the description and the customer does a search for that with "search in description" chosen it'll find product A. But not everyone does that option.
You can add it in tags or other places in the product. BUT then lets say the people do a search for "3/8x10" or "3/8 - 10" or "3/8" x10" or "3/8 inch x 10" or even "3 / 8 in 10" etc etc etc etc.
You can see how I'd have to have bunches of different ways to write possible variables in order for the built in search to find the product. Then add in every possible way to write each option, and misspellings for options that are words, OR colors that might describe the description of the product that are not options, etc. and you get to see what my quandary is.
I have purchases three extensions and I don't use any of them anymore since none of them are better then the build in one - and in one case - it actually retrieves irrelevant results, which is worse then too little results in my opinion.
I'd also think it would be great to have the category link come up when someone types is something like "Action" and Action is a product category.
Anyone have these types of problems overcome?
If so, did you do it by a search extension, manually adding more stuff to product fields in admin, an extension that scrapes the product and updates fields for each product, or ?
Thank you,
Mike
This has become my least favorite thing about Opencart. I really like opencart but what I see when I look at customer search report, is a lot of possible lost sales because of having to get the built in search to work well enough to give good results.
Let me give an example. I sell stuff that has different bolt / thread sizes. So they can have 3/8 x 10, 5/16 x 14, etc. Those are options and lets say they are product model "A".
If you do a search for 3/8 x 10 since it is an option it doesn't find product A.
If you have 3/8 x 10 in the description and the customer does a search for that with "search in description" chosen it'll find product A. But not everyone does that option.
You can add it in tags or other places in the product. BUT then lets say the people do a search for "3/8x10" or "3/8 - 10" or "3/8" x10" or "3/8 inch x 10" or even "3 / 8 in 10" etc etc etc etc.
You can see how I'd have to have bunches of different ways to write possible variables in order for the built in search to find the product. Then add in every possible way to write each option, and misspellings for options that are words, OR colors that might describe the description of the product that are not options, etc. and you get to see what my quandary is.
I have purchases three extensions and I don't use any of them anymore since none of them are better then the build in one - and in one case - it actually retrieves irrelevant results, which is worse then too little results in my opinion.
I'd also think it would be great to have the category link come up when someone types is something like "Action" and Action is a product category.
Anyone have these types of problems overcome?
If so, did you do it by a search extension, manually adding more stuff to product fields in admin, an extension that scrapes the product and updates fields for each product, or ?
Thank you,
Mike
I probably should have mentioned that