There are just two words that sum up the internal search function of Volusion eCommerce shopping cart software -- but being a professional, I won't use those two words, and will instead just say, "not good".

When a user searches your Volusion store, the search only returns results where the search term appears in the Product Code, Product Name or if the words were (manually) entered in the Additional Product Keywords field of a product record. By default, none of the text in product descriptions, product options, category pages, help files, policy pages, the "knowledge base", (or image alt tags, meta data, etc, etc), or any other text in your store is searched.

To enable Volusion's "extensive search", (which does at least search the description fields of your product pages), you need to add the following hidden input field into your search form.

<input type="hidden" name="Extensive_Search" value="Y">

Still the result pages are poorly formatted and since there are no suggestions for mis-spelled words, semantic or contextual search functionality, and no "best match" -- this leaves the user to fumble through the results, or worse; may cause potential customers to leave your site and go to Google or another search engine to locate the product they want to buy.

You May be Losing Sales because of Volusion Search!

But, there is a solution...

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So, you're whipping around the admin side of your Volusion store, you delete or add some categories, move some products from one category to another and then go to the user side of the store and the changes don't appear...

I found this problem when a category I deleted was still appearing in the left navigation menu, (and now gave the error message: Category ID# Does not Exist when I clicked it).

Why?... It seems Volusion does not alway publish all your changes immediately -- unless you set the Config Variable telling it to. Worse, sometimes Volusion does not honor this setting, (or forgets it was set), and you need to manually reset the variable.

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