Prioritize Selected Products in Search Results

Prioritize Selected Products in Search Results

Overview

When people perform searches in your online catalog, the results are usually sorted by "relevance," meaning that the products which have most/all of the search words in their product title appear first, following by lesser matches, i.e. the most relevant products related to the user's search words are listed first.

If you want to prioritize selected products and have them listed first (if they match the user's search words), then you can change how your catalog sorts search results from "By Relevance" to be "By Popularity" and then edit each of your priority products to give them a popularity number.

The instructions below will show you how to change your catalog's search sort order and also show you how to enter a "popularity number" for each product that you want to prioritize in search results.

Please note that this will not change product order when someone is browsing the catalog by category ("drill-down") and the priority products will only be shown if they match the user's search words.

Popularity Numbers

If you want all of your selected priority products to have the same rating, then use the same popularity number for each of them, e.g. 100

However, you have the ability to provide higher or lower popularity numbers to selected products to affect which product is shown first when multiple priority products match a user's given search words. For example, you might give some products a lower priority of 10, 20 or 30, and then some medium priority products a popularity number of 50 or 60, and your highest priority products a popularity number of 100 or so.

All products by default do not have a popularity number specified which will be treated as zero. Enter a popularity number of 1 or more to give a product a priority in search results. The higher the number, the higher the priority (gets listed first). Your popularity numbers should be between 1 - 999.

Preparation

Before you begin these instructions, make a list of the products that you wish to give a priority to. For each such product, list its SKU (Product Code) and the priority you wish to assign it. However, if you wish to give all priority products the same popularity number (e.g. 100), then just make a list of the SKUs to be edited.

Instructions

  1. Login to your Volusion Admin area.
  2. Go to DESIGN / Product Display Settings
  3. In the left margin under "Product Lists", click "Search Results" (if not already selected)
  4. Find the "Default Sort By" field change it's value to be "Most Popular"
  5. Click blue [SAVE] button (if the field value was changed)
  6. Do the following steps for EACH product that you wish to provide a priority to:
    1. Go to INVENTORY / Products
    2. Click [SEARCH] button
    3. Enter the unique product SKU in the "Code:" field and click the blue [SEARCH] button in the top-right corner (not the grey search button)
    4. In the resulting list, click the SKU link
    5. Scroll down to the "Advanced Info" area and click the "Advanced Info" heading to display the details under it (if not already displayed)
    6. Click "Misc" in the left margin of the Advanced Info section
    7. Enter your desired popularity number (e.g. 100) into the "Product Popularity" field
    8. Click blue [SAVE] button
    9. If you have more SKUs to update, repeat starting at the "Go to INVENTORY / Products" step

Permissions

If you are not able to access the "DESIGN / Product Display Settings" area or the "INVENTORY / Products" area in your Volusion catalog, then send a request to Emerge2 Support (email: support (at) emerge2.com) as follows:
Can you please:
  1. Set my catalog search Default Sort By to be: Most Popular
  2. Enable product update permission on my Volusion Admin login
  3. My Volusion Admin login email address is:
  4. My Volusion catalog address (URL) is: 

Instructions to Revert Back to Normal

Follow the above instructions to set the "Default Sort By" field back to "Relevance" and to edit each of the SKUs which you had previously gave a priority/popularity to, to clear/remove the "Product Popularity" field for each such SKU.