Users who have ATG Merchandising and ATG Search can also use a feature called Search Merchandising, which enables Commerce sites to customize search results based on site initiatives and customer purchasing patterns. For example, Search Merchandising makes it possible for a certain brand’s products to appear in search results ahead of other brands, either for all visitors (e.g., if your site is trying to promote the brand) or for a specific group of visitors who favor that brand. It also enables you to exclude certain results entirely, such as out of stock or discontinued items.
In ATG Merchandising, you create search configurations, which are sets of rules that control the display of search results. Depending on how ATG Merchandising is configured for you by your system administrator, you can create a single search configuration for all visitors at your site, or create different search configurations for different groups of site visitors. Visitors can be grouped by language (useful if your site is in multiple languages or has visitors from multiple countries), by user segment (useful for targeting specific search results to specific visitors), or both.
After you define and deploy search configurations, ATG Search prepares searchable content by indexing the products, SKUs, and other catalog assets and processes your search configurations. When a visitor enters a query in a search form on your Commerce site, the software considers the current language and the user segments the visitor is a member of, and determines which search configuration to apply. The search results that display and the order they display in reflect the search configuration that’s used.
In order to use Search Merchandising, an administrative user needs to configure your Commerce site and ATG Search to generate the search configurations you define and to apply them to search queries entered by site visitors. These tasks are described in the Search Merchandising chapter of the ATG Commerce Search Guide.
This guide covers Search Merchandising in the following sections:
Guidance on architecting a tree of search configuration folders and search configurations that incorporate base configurations is provided in Structuring the Search Configuration Tree.
The views you use to access search configurations, search configuration folders, and base search configurations as well as setup tasks are described in Locating Assets.
All administrative tasks, including creating search configuration folders, are explained in the Administering Search Merchandising.
Learn how to create search configurations and base search configurations in Creating Search Configurations and Base Search Configurations.
Specify settings to search configurations and base search configurations from Defining Search Configurations.
