Configure Storefront Search Preferences

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain the match type settings.
• Describe the product availability settings.
• List the six search settings.
• List the three email settings.

Storefront Search Preferences

Brandon Wilson, Cloud Kicks merchandiser, is ready to configure his basic search preferences. These preferences handle how Salesforce B2C Commerce search shows available products, makes autocorrections, accesses Commerce Cloud Einstein, and handles various automatic email notifications. He does all of this in Business Manager. 

Let’s go along with him as he explores what these preferences do and then configures them.

Product Availability Settings

Shoppers don’t like it when the exact product they want isn’t available. Finding out at checkout is no fun. Then they have to search all over again, or worse, they give up in frustration and leave the site. With Salesforce B2C Commerce, Brandon can make sure that only orderable products show up in search results.

The Show Orderable Products Only setting lets him hide unavailable products or specify an availability percentage. This percentage provides a threshold. Lower ranked products display at the end of the search results. For example, 0.3 means that all products with availability of 0.3 and below display at the end of the search result.

Shoppers see available products at the top of their search results, and they don’t have to scroll past products that aren’t in stock.

Ranking is done at query time, not at index building time. This means that when Brandon changes a rule or a threshold, the change takes effect immediately.

When Brandon uses the product availability setting, the results are not sorted by availability. For example, if he uses 0.3 as the threshold percentage, products with 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, are listed at the end of the search results but not necessarily in order. How search results are sorted is done via another group of settings, not described in this module. 

Search Settings

The B2C Commerce search settings, ranging from dictionary locale fallback to merging variation groups, are really important to good search results. Here’s what Brandon can configure.

Dictionary Locale Fallback

This setting makes regional linguistic search rules (such as stop words and category name exclusions) available for a language locale. Let’s define these terms.

A stop word is a word that doesn’t influence the result of a search query, such as articles and prepositions. For example, English stop words include a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, your, and with. Each language has its own set of stop words, and many languages have gendered versions such as algunas and algunos in Spanish, in effect doubling the number of stop words. It’s important to pay attention to locales to ensure an amazing shopping experience.

Category name exclusion means that you can exclude category names from being indexed as keywords for a product. Sometimes combination categories have subcategories with distinct products, and you want to make sure shoppers see what they are looking for. For example, Cloud Kicks has a Pants & Tights category. When a shopper searches for pants, they don’t want to see tights, and vice versa. Without this exclusion, they might because the Pants & Tights category name is inherited by all products in that catalog tree.

With the Dictionary locale fallback setting on, the Spanish language equivalent for you could be su, sus, tú, vosotros, or ustedes, depending on locale and who’s being addressed. In general, tú is informal and usted is formal. In most of Latin America, people use ustedes instead of vosotros (plural you), even when talking to close friends and family. In Argentina and nearby areas, people use vos instead of tú.

Brandon wants to make sure that his storefront gets it right. B2C Commerce applies the rules to the related region locales, and then applies the linguistic rules defined for the region locale itself.

Ignore Leading Zeros

With this setting on, B2C Commerce ignores leading zeros for all searchable attributes. This is helpful with product IDs. For example, it’s important that whether a shopper searches for 8234 or 008234, they find 008234.

Search Autocorrections

With this setting on, B2C Commerce automatically spell-corrects or completes search terms before the search even happens. 

Einstein Search Recommendations

Use this setting to enable a personalized search query correction with Commerce Cloud Einstein. Development is necessary for this feature to work: Configure the search bar dropdown to show Einstein Search Recommendations. 

Search Redirect Keyword Rules

Use this feature when you specify search keywords in the Business Manager Search Driven Redirect module. Brandon enables Search Redirect Keyword Rules so that shoppers get more results. If he doesn't use this setting, shoppers must enter an exact phrase to get results. Here are the settings.

• Exact: It must be an exact match of what the shopper entered.
• Phrase: Includes search terms with 2–5 words that are next to each other in a specific order. This decreases noise in search results by producing more targeted results for multiword searches.
• Broad: When the shopper enters multiple words without quotation marks, B2C Commerce finds products or content with one or more of the terms, in any order. For example, when a shopper enters running shoes, with no quotation marks, the results include both running and shoes in any order. It also finds singular/plural forms based on stemming for the specific language. It doesn’t include synonyms or other variations. Stemming reduces a word to a shorter base form, which increases recall in search. For example, all the words such as locks, locker, and locked are stemmed to lock.
• Negative: Exclude search results that include the exact phrase in the exact order.

Include Promotion IDs in the Product Index

When you enable this setting, B2C Commerce adds the promotion IDs to the product index for promotions that are configured as searchable. B2C Commerce can return products resulting from these promotions in a search.

Email Notification Settings

With these settings, Brandon doesn’t have to keep checking (or forget to check) certain parameters and then deal with issues later. Here’s what he can configure.

• Unbucketed Refinement Values: Notify selected users when there are unbucketed refinement values. After a new product import, new refinement attributes can be unaccounted for in existing bucketing rules, causing a poor storefront experience. (Don’t enable this setting on a production instance.)
• Search Indexer: Notify selected users when the number of indexing errors exceeds a threshold after indexing.
• Einstein Dictionaries: Notify selected users when there are new search dictionaries available.

Configure Search Preferences

Brandon’s ready to configure his search preferences. Here’s what he does.

1. Open Business Manager.
2. Select site > Merchant Tools > Search > Search Preferences.
   
   
3. In the Availability Settings section, select Show Orderable Products Only.
   
   
4. In the Search Settings section select:
   • Dictionary Locale Fallback
   • Ignore Leading Zeros (Rebuild index to activate.)
   • Search Autocorrections
   • Einstein Search Recommendations
   • Search Redirect Keyword Rules
   • Include Promotion IDs in the Product Index
5. In the Notification Settings for Unbucketed Refinement Values section:
   • Select Notification Email.
   • Enter bwilson@cloudkicks.com.
6. In the Notification Settings for Search Indexer section:
   • Select Notification Email.
   • Enter bwilson@cloudkicks.com.
7. In the Notification Settings for Einstein Dictionaries section:
   • Select Notification Email.
   • Enter bwilson@cloudkicks.com.
8. Click Apply.

Next Steps

In this module, you explored the B2C Commerce search preferences settings and configured them. Next, you learn how to configure category and advanced search settings.

Resources

• Trailhead: Smarter Search With Commerce Cloud Einstein
• Trailhead: Salesforce B2C Commerce for Merchandisers