When you search for a product in your Boost or Volusion catalog, and cannot find it, how can you determine the cause of the problem?
For Any Products
- Enter the SKU into the search box to see if you can find the product
- Enter the Product Name into the search box to see if you can find it
- If the product was recently added to the catalog, or if you haven't rebuilt the search index in the past month, then rebuild the search index of the catalog:
Volusion Admin / SETTINGS / Maintenance / Search Index: [REBUILD] (it runs for 5-15 mins, let it run in your web browser uninterrupted)
- Repeat searches 1. and 2. to see if the product shows up after the search index rebuild
- If you still cannot find it, then in Volusion Admin go to INVENTORY / Products / Filter [SEARCH] and enter the SKU into the Code field and search for it
- If the product is not found in the Admin Products area, then it's probably not in your catalog
For the keeners, you could do an extract of all of the products in your catalog into a spreadsheet and then search the spreadsheet to see if you can find the product:
Volusion Admin / INVENTORY / Import/Export / STANDARD EXPORT / Export From: [Products]
Do not "Check All" since there will be too much data and the export will probably time-out / abort. Instead, only select key fields for your extract and spreadsheet search, such as fields: ProductCode, ProductName, DisplayBeginDate, DisplayEndDate, HideProduct, StockStatus, CustomField5, Hide_When_OutOfStock, CategoryIDs, CategoryTree.
The reason we suggest extracting fields DisplayBeginDate, DisplayEndDate, HideProduct, StockStatus, Hide_When_OutOfStock, is so you can see if any of these fields is inhibiting the display of your product. Field CustomField5 shows who originally loaded each product into the catalog.
For Orgill Products
Ensure you are searching for the 7-digit all-numeric SKU code without the hyphen, e.g. search for "1234567", not for "123-4567".
Check the Boost Content Manager (BCM), or ask Emerge2 to check BCM for you, to see if any of the parent categories above this product have been disabled/suppressed, meaning that they are not being loaded into your catalog. This can happen for a variety of reasons, e.g. when product categorization is periodically reorganized by the Orgill product data group, sometimes the new categories are disabled by default (don't know why).
Parent Categories Example
Product SKU 2309862 (Trimmer String Cordless Bare 60V) is under the following parent categories:
LAWN & GARDEN / LAWN POWER EQUIPMENT / ELECTRIC L & G EQUIPMENT / STRING TRIMMERS - CORDLESS
If any one of the above categories is disabled in BCM, it will mean that SKU 2309862 will not be found in the associated catalog.
Simply re-enabling such disabled category(ies) will result in the products from the disabled categories being loaded into your catalog on the next product data refresh (usually weekly).
Questions