The thesaurus can help customers find products in your store, but poorly conceived entries might not be useful. To maximize the potential of the thesaurus, review the following tips:
Do not create thesaurus entries for common spelling corrections. Commerce Cloud fixes misspelled words automatically.
Do not create equivalent entries with different cases of the same word. The thesaurus is not case sensitive.
For example, entries such as Tartan = tartan are unnecessary.
Do not create an equivalent entry for a word with multiple meanings.
For example, “khaki” can refer to a color as well as to a style of pants. If you create an equivalent synonym for khaki = pants, then a shopper’s search for khaki towels could return irrelevant results for pants.
Do not create an equivalent synonym between a general and several more-specific terms, such as top = shirt = sweater = vest. This increases the number of results the shopper has to go through while reducing the overall accuracy of the items returned. In this instance, if a shopper searches for “vest” the shopper also gets results for “sweater.”
You get better results by creating individual one-way entries between the general term “top” and each of the more-specific terms. In that case a search for vests would only return vests, not sweaters, too. Only a search for “top” would return both sweaters and vests.
Do not create an entry that includes a term that is a substring of another term in the entry.
For example, consider an equivalent entry of “tackle” and “bait and tackle.” If shoppers type “tackle,” they get results for “tackle” or “bait and tackle” These are the same results they would have gotten for “tackle” without the thesaurus. If shoppers type “bait and tackle,” they get results for “bait and tackle” or “tackle,” causing the “bait and” part of the query to be ignored.
Avoid multiple word entries where single-word entries are appropriate.
In particular, avoid multiple word forms that are not phrases that shoppers are likely to type, or to which phrase expansion is likely to provide relevant additional results. For example, the equivalent entry “King Aethelbert of Wessex” = “King Athelbert of Wessex” should be replaced with the single-word entry Aethelbert = Athelbert.
