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Enhance Your Store’s Search with Zen Cart Search Reloaded

AJAX Auto Search Suggest

Last Updated on Oct 2, 2012 by Jeff Lew

Keep customers on your site longer and please the search engines by enhancing your cart’s search function. Use the Zen Cart Reloaded Search

AJAX Auto Search Suggest

AJAX Auto Search Suggest combined with Zen Cart Reloaded Search

module to improve your search results, boost your conversions, and offer your customers a better user experience.

The default Zen Cart search function is limited in that it matches the product’s attributes (model, title, description, etc.) and sorts them first by models. If the model is the same, the results are then sorted by title and so on. This system is not completely effective because it does not always return optimal results for the user since there is no regard for the relevancy of the keyword as it relates to the product match.

Once a user types a second word into the search box, the query will return results that match either one of the words. Users may see results near the top of the listing unrelated to their search because they may have matched the title or description but not the model. Yet, the relevant results could be too far away to keep users on the page. This leads to high bounce rates and a poor user experience.

Zen Cart Reloaded Search

The new Zen Cart Reloaded Search Module solves this problem by applying a weighting to specific attributes. If you determine title matches to be the most relevant, they will appear first. Set the weights in your admin panel to tweak the search results. You have the option to set weight by product name, product description, product model, and meta tags.

Want to take this module to the next level?

Combine it with our AJAX Auto Search Suggest module and maximize your conversions while improving “searchability” for the search engines. It’s a win-win for Ecommerce stores!

One thought on “Enhance Your Store’s Search with Zen Cart Search Reloaded

  1. Please note that full text search is not for everyone. If you are on shared hosting, you may not have enough control over the MYSQL settings to employ a full text search that works with your products. For example, MYSQL full text search has a minimum character requirement of 4. This means that if the user searches for keywords with 3 or less characters, there will not be any results. With higher level access to the server, you or your host can manipulate this setting.

    Other factors that may need adjusting are the stop words list (a large list of words that are not indexed for full text search) and the common words threshold (if a word exists in 50% or more of the results, it will not be searchable).


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