Docs / Search & Product Filter / Common questions

Common questions

The things merchants ask us most often, in the words they ask them, with the setting that answers each one. Written from a year of support tickets and ordered by how often each comes up.

Features, pricing and a free trial: Search & Product Filter for BigCommerce.

This page answers specific questions. Troubleshooting works from a symptom when you do not yet know the cause, and Search & Product Filter and Search document every setting in full.

Start here

Four things behind most questions

Storefront Nothing. Reading this page changes nothing on your store.

Most of what merchants report to us comes back to one of four things. Checking them first will answer a good share of questions on this page before you read any further.

Something is cached. Your browser holds a copy of the page, and search results are held for up to 24 hours per search term. A change you made a minute ago will often not be visible yet.
The catalogue has not synced. The app works from its own copy of your products. A product, category, brand or option added in BigCommerce reaches the filter when a sync picks it up.
Settings are per storefront. Filters and settings are stored against one storefront. A second storefront has its own, and starts empty.
The template must match your theme. The app reads your theme's product markup. If the selected template does not match your theme's layout, results come out wrong even though nothing is wrong with your products. Automatic on Template Select reads the cards from your theme for you.

Before you contact us

Storefront Nothing.

A hard refresh, Ctrl+F5 on Windows or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac, rules out a cached page in a few seconds and is worth doing before anything else.

If you do need us, send the page address showing the problem, your support PIN, and what you expected to see instead. A URL where we can see it ourselves is worth more than a description, and it is the single thing that most shortens a ticket.

Search finds the wrong things

Search returns far too many results

Storefront Changes how many products a search returns and how closely they match.

This is the most common search question we get, and it is almost always one setting.

If a two-word search returns hundreds of products when only a handful are right, your search is matching either word rather than both. Searching ceramic jar then returns everything ceramic plus everything that is a jar, added together, with the actual ceramic jars buried somewhere inside.

Matching App Settings › Search Settings

Search Precision: How closely a product must match. At its loosest setting a multi-word search behaves as described above. Raise it one step, save, wait a minute, then search again. Raise it another step if results are still broader than you want.

Search Match Any: Searches for any word in the product name rather than all of them. Useful for long descriptive searches, and the reason short searches come back too broad. Turn it off if you want every typed word to count.

Minimum Relevance (%): Drops the weak tail of matches for a broad word. A setting of 30 to 50 keeps the strong matches. See Search Engine 2 relevance controls.

Maximum Search Results: Caps how many products a broad search brings back, best matches first. Leave at 0 for no cap.

Change one of these at a time and test in between. Both affect the same behaviour, so moving both at once makes it hard to tell which did what.

A product cannot be found at all

Storefront Nothing by itself. It tells you which setting is hiding the product.

Start with Product Check in the Search menu. Enter the product's SKU or ID, and add the search term the customer used if you know it. It runs ten checks and names the one that is stopping the product, with a link to the page that fixes it.

One cause is worth knowing about: a category hidden from search. One hidden category can take out every product inside it, which is why this usually presents as a whole range disappearing rather than a single item. Check Manage Categories and Exclude Cat Products in the Search menu.

If the product is not in the search index, it has not reached the app yet. Products added recently arrive with the next sync, covered under Product Sync.

A misspelt search finds nothing

Storefront Nothing to change for the retry. The two settings below widen matching.

When a search finds nothing, the store retries it with the likely spelling or word form and tells shoppers what it searched for instead. Search Engine 2 handles misspellings better than Search Engine 1, and most Search Precision steps apply full typo tolerance.

For singular and plural, switch on Match singular and plural: a search that returned nothing is tried again allowing for both, so children also finds child. It only runs when a search found nothing, so it never changes results you already get. Searches that still return nothing appear in Zero Search Results, where a synonym or search keyword usually fixes them.

I changed a search setting and nothing happened

Storefront Nothing. This is about when a change becomes visible, not what it does.

Search results are cached for up to 24 hours per search term. The exact term you were testing may keep returning its old result for a while after you have fixed the underlying cause, while other terms already show the new behaviour.

Testing a slightly different spelling or a different capitalisation is the quickest way to see whether your change worked, because that term will not have a cached result yet.

My synonyms have made search worse

Storefront Changes which products a search term matches.

Synonym rules are more powerful than they look, and a rule that seems harmless can widen every search that touches it. Two behaviours account for nearly all of the trouble:

Rules work in both directions. A rule linking A to B also makes B find A. Shoppers type either one.
Multi-word rules are matched a word at a time. A rule pairing a long phrase with a single common word makes that common word mean every word of the phrase. A rule linking sea salt flakes to flakes makes a search for flakes also mean sea and salt, so it returns hundreds of unrelated products. Switch on Match Multi-Word Synonyms as Phrases to make a rule such as garlic sauce match only products containing both words together.

If search went broad after you added synonyms, look for any rule that pairs a short common word with a long product name, and for rules holding a full product title, a price, a tracking link or a list of product codes. Those widen searches the same way. Remove them and test again.

Removing a rule is the fix here, not adding more. Adding further rules to correct a broad rule widens the problem rather than narrowing it. If the set has grown beyond what is worth untangling, Delete all on the Synonyms page clears every rule so you can start again.

Search fails when shoppers type commas or ampersands

Storefront Nothing to change. This is handled for you.

Punctuation typed between words is treated as punctuation, so mustache, cigar, whiskey returns the same products as the same words without commas, and birthday&card matches birthday card. Numbers that genuinely contain a comma, such as 1,000, are unaffected.

You do not need to add punctuation to your Ignore Words list. That list is for whole words you want dropped from a search, not for characters. Adding punctuation to it will not do what you expect.

Ignore Words does not seem to apply

Storefront Removes the listed words from what a shopper typed before matching.

Ignored words are removed from the search term before results are matched, and matching is on whole words only. Ignoring in will not affect vintage or india.

One thing that catches people out: the dropdown that appears while typing and the full results page do not always agree while you are mid-change, because they match by different routes. Judge the change on the results page.

A filter is missing or wrong

A value is missing from a filter

Storefront Adds the value to the filter panel with its product count.

Some filters are built from a list of categories you choose, not from your products. A category added to your catalogue does not join a custom category tree on its own.

Go to the Filters page in the app.
Open the actions menu (…) beside the filter that is missing the value and choose Configure.
Open Included Categories.
Tick the new category and save.

It then appears alongside the others with its count. If the category is not in the list to tick at all, it has not reached the app yet and needs a sync first.

For other filters, values come from your synced data. A new value shows up after the next sync, and Value Replacer merges near-identical spellings into one.

Filter counts look wrong, or values sit at zero

Storefront Hides values, and whole sections, once nothing is left behind them.

Values that stay on screen with a count of zero after a shopper narrows their selection are the default behaviour rather than a fault.

What customers see App Settings › Filter Settings

Hide 0 Counts: Removes values once their count drops to zero, so the list shrinks to what is still available. If every value in a section falls to zero the whole section hides itself, and returns when those options are relevant again. Off by default.

Hide Filter Counters: Removes the number beside each value entirely.

If you want ticking a second value to add its products rather than narrow what is already there, switch on Additive multi-select counts in the filter's Configure window. The count beside each value then matches what shoppers get.

If counts are not merely zero but plainly wrong, and a category showing hundreds of products in BigCommerce shows a handful under the filter, that is not a settings problem. Send us the category address and we will look at it.

The filter shows categories that have nothing to do with the page

Storefront Limits the category filter to the part of the catalogue being browsed.

By default the category filter can list any category sharing a product with the current page, which is how unrelated entries such as a Sale category appear on a specific product page.

In the category filter's Configure window, switch on Only show categories in the current branch to limit it to the branch the shopper is already in. Sibling categories at that level are still shown, so shoppers can move sideways between related ranges rather than reaching a filter with nothing in it. It takes effect straight away.

If you do not see this option, check which category filter your sidebar is built from. Stores using the Category Tree filter and stores using the standard category filter have separate settings, and it is easy to be looking at the one your storefront does not use.

Filter values are in the wrong order

Storefront Changes the order values appear in the panel.

Category filters list their values alphabetically unless you tell them otherwise. Open the filter on the Filters page, choose Configure and set Sort Order to BigCommerce Sort Order to follow the order you set in BigCommerce. You can switch back to Alphabetical at any time.

For values inside other filters, such as sizes, use Sort Order under Filters: drag the values into order, or order a long list in a spreadsheet with Download CSV and Upload CSV. Shoppers see the values in exactly the order you saved.

If you have already set an order and the storefront still shows the old one, you are looking at a cached copy of the page. Ordering for filters as a whole, rather than values within one, is covered under Filter Display Order.

Products are missing from a category

Storefront Nothing in the app. This is about how products are assigned in BigCommerce.

A product assigned only to a child category does not appear under its parent. If a product is missing from a parent category in the filter, check that it is assigned to the parent as well as the child in BigCommerce, then sync.

The filter does not appear at all

Storefront The filter panel is either delivered to the page or it is not.

Work through these in order. They are the causes we see most often, cheapest first.

Hard refresh the page. Ctrl+F5, or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac.
Check the storefront is not in maintenance mode in BigCommerce. A storefront under maintenance shows nothing to visitors, the filter included. Use the preview link to see it.
Check the catalogue has synced. A new or newly rebuilt storefront has nothing for the filter to work with until its first sync finishes.
Check you are on the right storefront. Filters are stored per storefront, so a second storefront starts with none.
Check the filter is on and the script is installed. Status in App Settings › Filter Settings should read Filter On, and Manage Scripts should show the script installed for that storefront.

If all four are fine and the filter still does not show, tell us and include the page address. The script that delivers the filter can stop reaching some page types while working normally elsewhere, which makes the problem look intermittent when it is not. That one is ours to fix, not something you can correct from settings.

Product cards

Cards in results do not match my theme

Storefront Changes the markup used for every product card in filter and search results.

The app reproduces your theme's own product card. When cards come out looking wrong, the selected template usually does not match your theme.

The layout matters more than the name. A template built for a list layout applied to a theme that uses a grid will look wrong, because the app is looking for a product grid that is not there. Choosing the closest sounding name is what causes this.

Theme Settings › Template Select

Template Select: The template the app uses to build product cards. Pick the entry matching your theme exactly. If your theme is not listed, tell us and we will build one from your storefront's own markup rather than have you guess.

Switch to Automatic: Builds the cards from the ones your own theme draws, so you do not pick a template by hand. The app reads them again after each sync.

Fields are missing from cards in results

Storefront Changes what each card shows in filter and search results.

If a field shows on your normal category page but not in filtered or search results, the usual cause is that your theme adds it with a script after the page has loaded, and that script only runs on the original page. The card the app reads and reuses arrives without it.

On Automatic, Re-read my product cards on Template Select reads them again, which helps after a theme change. For a field your theme adds with a script, this is not something you can correct from settings. Tell us which fields are missing and we will add them to your cards.

Wording on the card itself, such as showing View rather than Add to Cart, is a change we make for you. Ask and we will set it.

Storefronts and installation

My theme is not on your list

Storefront Nothing until a template is selected.

Use Request help on Template Select and we will add it, built from your own storefront's markup. Do not pick the nearest sounding option as a stopgap, because a template that does not match your theme's layout produces exactly the broken filters and results you are trying to avoid. Automatic on the same page is an alternative: it reads the product cards from your live theme.

I have more than one storefront

Storefront Each storefront is configured on its own.

Filters and settings are stored per storefront. A second storefront starts empty and is configured separately, and work you do on one does not carry across. Billing works the same way, one subscription per storefront.

Search matches on each storefront's own products, so a product on one storefront does not surface through another.

Can I use it on a headless storefront?

Storefront Adds the filter and search to your own pages once you place the tag and the elements.

Yes, on Catalyst or a frontend of your own. BigCommerce Script Manager does not run there, so open Template Select and choose Headless storefront setup. It gives you the tag to place on your category, brand and search pages, the elements your chosen template expects and the address of your search results page, all filled in for your store and ready to copy. The steps are in Headless storefront setup.

Nothing works on my staging or sandbox store

Storefront Nothing until the store syncs and leaves maintenance mode.

Two things catch people out on a staging store. It usually needs its first sync to finish before filters have anything to work with, and staging stores are commonly left in maintenance mode, which hides the storefront from visitors including the filter. Use the preview link, or take it out of maintenance, to see the filter.

How do I remove the app completely?

Storefront Removes the app's scripts from your storefront.

Go to Apps › My Apps in your BigCommerce admin.
Find the app in the list.
Click the three dots beside it and choose Uninstall.
Confirm.

If you only want the app off your storefront for now, use Remove script in Manage Scripts instead, which takes the script off one storefront and leaves the app installed. Uninstalling removes the app's scripts from your storefront and clears its data on our side. Your products, categories and store settings are untouched. If something still appears afterwards it is a cached copy of your theme's pages, so give it a few minutes and refresh.

Uninstalling clears the catalogue we have synced, along with it your filters and settings. If you reinstall later you will need to select your template again and let the catalogue re-sync. Uninstalling is not a way to reset a problem, and it is worth asking us first.

Billing and subscription

How is the app priced?

Storefront Nothing.

Billing is per storefront, banded by the number of products on that storefront. A storefront moves into a higher band as its catalogue grows past a band boundary. Several storefronts are billed as several subscriptions, each priced on its own product count.

Current bands and prices are on the Packages section, and your own are on the billing page in the app.

My invoice does not match what the app shows

Storefront Nothing.

The usual explanations, in the order they turn out to be true: your catalogue has grown into a higher band, our pricing has changed since you subscribed, or a credit shown on the billing page has not yet reached the invoice you are looking at.

If none of those fit, send us the invoice and what you expected. We would rather look than have you work it out.

I appear to have two subscriptions

Storefront Nothing.

Add-ons are billed as their own subscription alongside the storefront subscription, so an account with one storefront and one add-on correctly shows two. The billing page lists add-ons separately so you can see what each covers.

If you cannot match a subscription to a storefront or an add-on, ask us and we will account for it.

Can I extend my trial?

Storefront Nothing.

Usually yes, and the one thing that holds it up is that the app has to be installed on the store first. There is no trial to extend on a store where the app has never been installed, so install it, then tell us the store address.

An extension replaces the standard trial rather than running alongside it, so nothing is lost by installing before you ask.

How do I cancel?

Storefront The filter and search stop serving when the subscription ends.

Uninstall the app from Apps › My Apps in your BigCommerce admin, as above. Cancelling and what happens to your data is covered in full under Cancelling.

If you are cancelling because something is not working, tell us what it is first. Most of what we are asked to cancel over turns out to be a setting.

Getting help

Support PIN

Your App Pin is shown in the App Status panel on the dashboard. Include it on every ticket so we can open your exact configuration. The Support link in the sidebar fills in your store for you.

Change log

The Changelog, under Help, lists what has shipped. Check it before reporting a problem — the fix may already be live.

Contact us

Raise a ticket from the Support link under Help in the app, or email support@freshclick.co.uk. Include your store hash, your support PIN, and a URL showing the problem.