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BigCommerce Search Hierarchy

Overview

When setting up product information in BigCommerce, it's important to think about how your customers will find those products. In this article, we'll go over how the BigCommerce search function works, specifically regarding how it prioritizes different elements of a product when a customer searches for something on your website.

Search Details

Before we look into the hierarchy, let's establish some of the basic search mechanics BigCommerce uses. The BigCommerce search engine prioritizes matching the first word, and then moves on to the other words being searched. So, for example if you were to search "red dress" (without quotation marks), BigCommerce would pull up red products first, and then dresses, because dress is the second word in the search term.

Search Hierarchy

BigCommerce prioritizes different product elements in the following order:

  1. SKU (exact matches)
  2. Product Name (exact matches)
  3. Brand Name
  4. Keywords (exact matches)
  5. Product Name (partial matches)
  6. Description
  7. SKU (partial matches)
  8. Keywords (partial matches)

Wherein "exact match" means the term in the search box exactly matches the SKU, product name, etc., and "partial matches" meaning it's only a partial match.

You can edit product keywords in the Storefront Details area of the product edit process, although seeing as product keywords are relatively low in the search hierarchy, it may not be worth the effort. Please keep this in mind when entering your products in BigCommerce.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to submit a support request.