Searching Tips & Tricks

This knowledgebase will give you a few pointers on how to search effectively in StoreFeeder.

Search Everywhere

We introduced Search Everywhere to allow lightning-fast searching when you are looking for a specific Order, Product, Page or Support Article.  This is very handy when a customer calls in and gives you their order number, email address or postcode for example.  Simply enter the search term into the box and it will return the matching results.  From there you can simply click on the entry you require and you will be taken to the correct page in StoreFeeder.  This also works with help articles, you will be taken to the relevant knowledgebase entry.

In use cases like this where you know what you are searching for is something specific that will only return a few options its what you should use as your primary method of searching.

At the time of writing, listing information isn't currently indexed so you are unable to search for listing information but this and other useful data is being added all the time.

Using StoreFeeder Search Everywhere

Grid Filtering and Searching

Obviously, we understand that you don't always know exactly what you are looking for or you need access to broader data, maybe so you can export.  This is where the filters on the grids come into play.  These should be primarily used when you want to get a listing of a lots of data.  For example you might want to know how many orders come from a specific country.  Or you might want to know all of your products with less than 10 inventory.  You can use the filters to get this information but as this is potentially searching a lot of information it could be very slow or even time out.  To help with this we advise you be as specific as you can with filtering.  Maybe limit your order searches by channel or your product searches by supplier. 

We recently introduced the ability to save filters which if you have a specific list of data you need frequently you can apply all the filters in one go.  Handy for extracting month-end order data so you just need to amend the dates

Saving Grid Filters

When (not) to use wildcards

A special mention needs to be made about wildcard searching (or you may know this as star searching).  While this is very powerful, you need to be careful of how you use them.  In the wrong situation, it can severely affect the speed and efficiency of grid searching.

For Example:

Entering a surname with a double wildcard of "*smith*" would have to search every record on the DB and check if the surname contains "smith".  So "Smith", "Smithy", "Blacksmith" etc would all be returned.  This is very inefficient and will likely lead to timeouts.  So using multiple asterisks should be avoided unless really necessary.

A surname of "Smith*" limits the searching drastically because it is only looking for surnames that begin "Smith" so can safely ignore any surnames beginning with any other string.  While this is significantly better wildcard searching again should only be used when necessary.  An ideal use case for this would be all SKUs beginning with a certain string where the following parts may include sizing info i.e "MyProd*" would return:

• MyProd-Sml
• MyProd-Med
• MyProg-Lrg

But if you can limit the filter by including other columns such as Supplier or Warehouse for example it will speed up the search.

Finally, entering "*smith" again is very inefficient as again it has to search through much more data and so again should be avoided unless really necessary

A final note would be to not use wildcard searching (or worse double wildcard) on multiple fields as this will exponentially make the query worse.  

For Example:

A Forename search of "*Jo*" combined with a surname of "*Smith*" will almost certainly time out due to the sheer amount of data that needs to be searched.

Storefeeder Search fields and Wildcard Filtering

Slow Searches and Timeouts

When things go wrong and searches with specific information are taking too long or failing.  It could be that we need to optimise the system.  You will need to get in contact with the support team.  In order to be able to help you we need you to give us as much information as possible.  Simply saying for example "orders are slow", doesn't give us anywhere to start and the most we can do in that situation is log onto your account to see if anything stands out.

What we ideally need from you are:

• The page you were on
• Any filters and values you were using ( if you can type any examples rather than a screenshot it really helps us as we can copy what you have written rather than retyping from an image)
• Is it affecting multiple users?
• Any error messages that you are shown
• Any other info you think might be useful.

With this info we stand a much better chance of discovering the issue and making any optimisations required.