You are here:
Commerce Administrator Considerations for Product Searchability
Commerce administrators must ensure that certain conditions are met to search for products in storefronts.
Required Editions
| View supported editions. |
Which Salesforce Commerce Product Do I Have?
To search for a product in B2B stores, buyers and shoppers must have:
- CRUD read access to the product and catalog
- Entitlement to view the product
- Field-level security (FLS) access to all product fields that are configured for search
Important To ensure buyers and shoppers can view search results, don’t use FLS restrictions on indexed product or catalog fields.Use FLS to control access to the information in object fields through profiles, permission sets, or from the field itself. Product fields respect your Salesforce FLS settings, which affect whether a product or the information in a product field is discoverable. Using FLS to restrict a shopper’s access to a field that’s searchable or filterable prevents that shopper from conducting a search.
For more information, see Field-Level Security. - Access to all indexed fields
Regardless if one or many product fields are indexed, if a shopper can’t access one indexed field, the shopper can’t search your store.
Search returns results only for a full token match—when all search terms are present in a result. Partial token matching, like prefix and infix searches, isn’t enabled. But stemming is enabled. So search results list all matches to a word’s stem—for example, “coffee” finds coffees, and “run” returns runner, running, and so on.
Search Considerations for Product Entitlements in B2B Stores
In Experience Builder, many components are available to you for building your store. The components that were developed specifically for B2B store environments respect user entitlements. When buyers view products through a component, such as Results Layout, they see only those products that they’re entitled to see.
For a B2B store, if you want buyers and guest users to see only categories that have entitled products, contact Salesforce Customer Support to enable this functionality. If a category has no entitled products, it also doesn’t appear in the storefront. To view a category or its descendent categories, it must have entitlement to at least one product within the category. Update your search index for any category changes to take effect. The Account Selector option isn't available with this feature.
Some components don't respect entitlements, so use caution when introducing them to your store. For example, be cautious with the CMS Collections component. All users can see any product that you expose through this component, whether the user is a guest, entitled, or unentitled. The same is true for a Product Record List. For the Record List component, we advise not using it in your store.
Another component to be cautious of is Global Search. When you configure the types of results it can return, don't include Products objects. However, the Results Layout component respects user entitlements, so use it for product searches. For searches for things like cases, articles, and feeds, you can use Global Search.
Search Results Limits
To achieve the highest performance, the Commerce Search engine limits search results returned and displayed to the most relevant 10,000 products for each search query, even if there are more results. For example, if a query matches 20,000 results, Commerce Search will still show 10,000 results. When a customer modifies existing search results using sorting options or filters, Commerce Search uses the updated criteria to search all products again before showing the new results.
In addition, for pages using the Results Layout component, Commerce Search shows only up to 5,000 additional results after the first results page, even if there are more results. For example, say you set the results per page to 20, and a search request results in 10,000 products. Commerce Search orders the results based on sort settings and displays the first page of 20 results. It then provides 250 additional pages of 20 products each for a total of 5,020 viewable results. By comparison, if you set the results per page to the maximum setting of 200, the first page shows 200 results. Commerce Search then provides 25 more pages of 200 products each for a total of 5,200 viewable results.
Commerce Search shows the most relevant results for any sort or filter settings. To view more results, customers can use sorting options to reorder output or use filter values to refine their search.
Search Results Count Approximation
To improve search performance on queries with a large number of results, displayed product and facet counts are approximated. When a search reaches this high threshold of results, computing the exact value slows performance and customers generally only need an approximation. To keep results counts lower, consider modifying catalog size, category structure, and filterable attribute value distribution.
Search Suggestions
Search Suggestions can be enabled in any search component to provide suggestions that match products from your store’s catalog. Catalog suggestions appear after the user enters three or more characters. The suggestions update dynamically as the user continues to enter or delete characters. To keep the search suggestions current with your catalog, perform an update of your Commerce search index. If you also enable Einstein, the suggestions are enhanced by using shoppers’ search activity to learn the best search terms over time.
Search Considerations for Promotions in B2B Stores
Promotion tier pricing isn’t reflected in prices on the Search Results page. However, promotional pricing is reflected on other pages, such as the Product Details and Cart pages.
Troubleshoot Translation and Localization Issues in B2B Stores
| Issue | Resolution |
|---|---|
| Stemming isn’t working as expected. For example, different results appear when searching for “glove,” “gloves,” and “glove’s.” | Go to Setup | Company Information and enable Data Translations. |
| Searching in a different language doesn’t yield the expected results. | Make sure that translations are defined for all products and languages. If you don’t define translations for all products in all languages enabled for the store, including the default language, the search returns products only when the customer searches for matching values in the product record detail. |
| After marking fields as filterable and updating the search index, the filters don't appear in the store. | Go to Setup | Company Information and enable Data Translations. |
| After adding a language and setting the user’s language to it, an error occurs when navigating to a category. | Update the Commerce search index when you add new languages or translations to your store or product catalog. |
| Picklist values don't appear in the search results after creating a store in a different language than the org. | Make sure to provide translated values to your picklist if your store uses a different language than the default language of your org. |
