Product Ref Search

[Mike Hughes]

I currently have 'Hide Product References in Online catalog' selected but would like customers to be able to use the product reference (from a printed price list) to find the right product online.

At the moment, when I do a search on a product ref I get ' No matching products were found'.

Is this because the product references are hidden on the website or because I've broken something. Anyone know?

Thanks

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

Ok. I've answered this myself. I put up a temporary site with actinics default setup and tested on the calculator product (I gave it a manual product ref).

If I select 'Hide Product References in Online catalog' then search can't find products by product ref.

If I deselect 'Hide Product References in Online catalog' then search can find the products by product ref.

I guess this means that if I wan't to use this function I have to find a place for the product reference in my templates. I could always hide them in HTML but I'm not sure Google would like that.

The HTML pages always have the <a name=a"prod ref"> so i was hoping it would use those for search. No luck though.

Mike

[cdicken]

All I can suggest is to show your product references, but then maybe hide them by making them small and making the font colour the same as the background colour (although I'm sure search engines will hate this).

[brian.mc]

I currently have 'Hide Product References in Online catalog' selected but would like customers to be able to use the product reference (from a printed price list) to find the right product online.

At the moment, when I do a search on a product ref I get ' No matching products were found'.

Is this because the product references are hidden on the website or because I've broken something. Anyone know?

Thanks

Mike

Is it really important that product references are not shown? I find that customers who, for whatever reason, are uncomfortable about ordering online, are happy to telephone their orders quoting the product reference, which they could not do if it was hidden. Also, if you want them to use the product reference in a search, would it not be beneficial to have the reference displayed to reassure them they had located the correct item?

Regards
Brian

[Mike Hughes]

I don't really have a problem with showing the product references, it's just a case of where to put them.

Quite a few of my products are laid out as a single line and there's just no space left for a product ref. An example line would have:

Product description RRP Our Price Select Size (drop down) Buy Button


It's also a problem that there's a different product ref for each size and thus one line can be for 5 or 6 different products. Putting the product ref next to the size in the drop down button would be one solution (? - not sure), but again it'll take up space I just don't have available.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

You could try this trick to make the reference invisible but still searchable:-

<noscript>NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREF</noscript>

This is also a useful technique to use within product descriptions to hide search terms (like common mispellings of words).

E.g. !!<<<noscript>>!!mispeld wurds heyr!!<<</noscript>>!!

Norman

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Norman, that's useful to know.

I wonder what tags actinic will consider as 'content' for the search facility. For example if they would index <a name=product ref><a> tags that would be very useful.

Maybe that could be added to the wishlist as a search option.

Mike

[cdicken]

It just uses the content of the short description, full description and (optionally) the extended information text. It will also index the product reference if you have them shown in the online store.

If you are not using extended information windows, you could put the product reference code in that field.

[Mike Hughes]

If you are not using extended information windows, you could put the product reference code in that field.

I just tried that and its works really nicely. I can even put in multiple product references for the products that have drop down options.

Of course I have to do manually, but I guess I could fill in the fields in the database if I needed to automate it.

Thanks Chris.

Mike

[jont]

Issue is under v7 but this was the closest thread.

I am creating an automatic link from an image (part of a cut down template) that works by using inserting the product reference in to a search script eg:

.....cgi-bin/ss000099.pl?PRODREF=NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE&ACTI...etc

The code is working on another site which has the product reference showing and takes the user from the cut-down duplicate to the product proper. The current site hides the product reference which I assume is resulting the not found error.

I can enable product ref and simply set a CSS to hide the value in the product template but that leaves a whole host of other areas (cart, receipt etc) where it will show - they are not very "nice" codes and probably best hidden.

Any ideas on how to resolve this under v7 would be greatly appreciated.... don't want to start stripping product refs out from everywhere if it is going to kill some complex perl script somewhere

[cdicken]

Jonty

I've just tested this with my v7.0.6 and found that NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE works in the product line templates even when product references are being auto-generated. It's odd that this doesn't work on yours.

FYI, the only template you would need to edit to remove the product references is Act_ShoppingCartXML.html.

[jont]

Chris,

the actual code I am using is

href="http://www.site.com/cgi-bin/ss000099.pl?PRODREF=NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://www.myserver.com/acatalog/&NOLOGIN=1"

.... this is using the simple seach script to find the product. If I enter a know product reference directly into the simple seach box on the site it come back with "product not found" as per this threads OP.

If I strip it out of ShoppingCartXML will that stop it being passed through for customers to see?

[cdicken]

If I strip it out of ShoppingCartXML will that stop it being passed through for customers to see?

Yes, that's right.

Try and leave the table structure intact (although you can use colspans to merge cells together) and just comment out the NETQUOTEVARs you don't want.

[jont]

Cheers Chris