Search and Navigation Implementation Considerations

Requirements Phase

Identify how many types of search are required for the solution. For example, do you want different behavior or presentation for different categories: top sellers versus clearance items or for content assets versus products?

Paging logic:

• Determine which pages show search results.
• Determine how many search results to show per page.
• Determine what happens when:
  • No search results are defined for a category or product
  • Less than the planned number of search results are defined for a category or product. For example, you want to redirect a search to a category page or another page to provide the user with more results.
  • More than the planned number of search results are defined for a category or product. For example, you want the customer to be able to refine their search.

Sorting and ranking logic:

• Determine how many ways a customer might want to sort results
• Determine whether you want to promote specific products through search
• Determine what happens when:
  • Multiple sorts are applied in a specific order
  • Ranking logic is applied to reposition results after sorting

Indexing attributes:

• Identify what additional information is required for indexing, so that customers can search on it. Every attribute that is needed for indexing must be marked as searchable.
• Identify required search features, including:
  • Category placement
  • Search placement
  • Search rank
  • Text relevance boosting

Maintaining indexes:

• Identify how data for indexes will be maintained (for example, import, manual, programmatic, or other):
  • During development
  • When the site is live
• If the merchant plans to manually create search indexes in the Business Manager, identify:
  • Who will be responsible for creating them
  • If there will be a review process
  • How they are tested
  • How search indexes are replicated with catalog data

If the merchant plans to import search index definitions, define the import process. If possible, implement it as a job within Salesforce B2C Commerce, so that you can take advantage of the scheduling and notification functionality built into B2C Commerce. If you intend to perform regular index updates, these can also be scheduled in Business Manager.

Design Phase

Operational Overhead

During the design phase, merchants should consider the day-to-day operational overhead associated with creating and maintaining search indexes manually within B2C Commerce, especially merchants with large product catalogs. This process includes examining current customer searches, identifying needed changes, configuring dictionaries and indexes, and manually building and replicating indexes.

Build Phase

Build code to support search requirements.

Development/Test Phase

To facilitate development and testing, you must:

• Create users with permissions that are in line with merchant-defined business processes.
• Create an initial set of test search results.
• Use a test plan to ensure that all use cases are reviewed, including current Storefront searches, if known.
• Test the import process, if applicable.