Identifying products in Search (by name) results page

[junkyard]

Hello!
We have a 3 level structure of categories for our products:    Level 1 > Level 2 > Level 3   (Make > Brand > Year)
It more or less represents used(well, pre-owned auto parts in our store.   It is fine if a consumer browses Catalog she can finally get to the right junk for her car.

But when she uses the Search to try and find parts by name,  she's having a hard time identifying the part for her exact car  among the multiple parts she gets listed  in her search results  because:
- all the products have largely similar looking names (like for example, a "Crankshaft" or "Oil Filter" ), 
- and only the pictures and prices are different...
This moment the consumer's pulling their hair out on the search results page cause the only way for  them to  choose among found products correctly  would be to deep breath and open EACH found product details in separate browser tab, then look through each products' details...  ( Note that product details page also won't tell you anything of the upper categories your product comes from:  it is only from the product description text we add where you can get the idea of product Category on that page. )

By any chance,  is there any way to indicate(show)  Level 2  category name (brand)  under each product title that are output  on the Search results page?
That would be a tremendous help  for the consumers  to identify the right product surprisingly easy and quickly. 
We really appreciate all of your time and energy spent to make AbanteCart the best free shopping cart ever likely to find. Your all exceptional people!

[abantecart]

This will require controller/template edit

I think you can try product features extension, that can be used to set specific details for the product 

[llegrand]

Hi Junkyard,

I don't think Product Features extension will do it for what I think you're trying to accomplish.  Customer still has to be into the product description area and then needs to click on the Features tab in order to see them.  So that's adding even one more click to the process. 

I do have the Product Features Extension on my testing site.  I set up a test to see if search would pickup entries in there,  it does not.  Additionally the field with which one adds these features is seriously under-provisioned.  No graphics! You can put in a large amount of text,  but you can't see it all  - see pics for what I mean.  That's a bummer if you're trying to edit.  I have to do it in text doc , copy and paste. 

I did test to see if search used tags to further sort.  The good news is they do.  Maybe you can use tags in some manner until the cart expands it's functionality. 

One word of caution here,  if you use cloning to add products NEITHER Product Features Extension or Tags  replicate.  You have to add each from scratch on every product.

If you come up with something that works - please share.

Lee

[junkyard]

Thank you very much for your suggestion,  and thank you Lee for the caution.  We do have the Product Features extension purchased in September (it didn't work as expected back then, as products could not be found in Search by created features, so it was disabled for good). This extension can help show more in the product details yes, however we already have the standard product description just enough to explain our products, and the tags to alleviate search, so the keywords and product details are not a problem (and the extension is switched off).  The problem is on the page of the products listing where extension is no help (we have tested), the listing of products returned by the Search:
   public_html/storefront/controller/pages/product/search.php
   public_html/storefront/view/default_html5/template/pages/product/search.tpl
   public_html/storefront/view/default_html5/template/pages/product/product_listing.tpl

The list from the search only shows you a product name, image and price. There is no way to show other details or hints, no mention of parent sub-categories of listed products, or any other descriptions. This is OK when every product's unique, or consumers do not care which category their products have come from.
But when you have 3 level categories (model > brand > year), and  most products have somewhat similar names that can be distinguished only by opening product description, this is when you will get confused by 10  weirdly looking Solenoids found in Search.   If only consumers saw their  Level 2 category (Brand) under each product's name  ( not even Level 1(Make) or Level 3(Year),  which are no big help for the identification!),  that would do it  but there's no setting for it.

As we understood, this is a hard coded behavior that cannot be changed (likely initially designed for very simple and small web-stores). All we can do is to type the names of Level 2 categories into the Product Name field after the product names for each product we have, or even stamp it onto the product photos...  We know this isn't good looking solution but that's the only one we are seeing...  Hopefully it helps others who have to deal with more complex inventories.

Just a thought, a better solution could be having one more variable in product parameters (say "Product Alias"), that could contain additional name or a brief description, that could be presented in the product Listing found by Search -- just below each Product Name in a smaller-sized font. That would make it for our consumers. Sorry, we should have created this topic in the new features suggestion but didn't realize it back then.

[llegrand]

Ah,  I understand better what you're needing to accomplish.

This might be a backdoor way -  within the media resource you can add a title and a description.
Now in testing I can't see anything on the html5 template that makes use of that. 

The documentation is silent in what these fields are for and I am assuming it might be when pics don't display.
Seems if the fields are there,  you could take advantage of it.

Perhaps you can adjust your template to display the title and/or description of the pic that shows up on the sub-cat???

For all of us non-coding folks -  it would be nice if the cart added a feature on the product page so we could select to display the first bit of a description under the pics on the cat, sub-cats displays.  So that in your case -  you could start the description with  something descriptive like '1999 Ford V8 standard solenoid   ...............'  and by selecting show short desc,  the first line or show would show up  with  'more" .  Just thinking about a bit.

Keep us posted if you figure out a solution.

Lee

[junkyard]

This is interesting, we just gave it a try but no -- the title and the description in the Media|Image|Edit resource are solely for the purpose of identifying images in the Resource Library, at least no influence on the customer's experience.. Thinking of working around the product names -- opened topic here:
http://forum.abantecart.com/index.php/topic,1272.0.html