Overview
Search
Search is one box that finds anything in your catalog by name or by SKU, and clicking a result takes you right to the record.
Search is one box that looks through your whole catalog at once and takes you right to the record you name. You type a few letters, and a grouped list comes back: your products first, then your brands, then your categories, and six more kinds after them. Click a row and it opens.
Most people use search when they know what something is called, or know its SKU, and walking the catalog would take longer than typing. It is also the quickest way to get to another part of the PIM, because the same list gives you a short set of destinations alongside your records. Nothing you do here changes your catalog, so there is nothing to break by typing into it.
You open search from Search, the button at the right end of the header, and that button is on every screen. Search then fills the page: a box replaces the page title, and your results fill everything under it.
Before you start
Everyone in your organization searches the same catalog. Your role does not hide a product, a brand or a file from you, and it does not change what matches. What it changes is where a result can take you next.
Two rows in your list are for the Admin role only. One is an integration result, which opens the connected account behind it. The other is the Integrations destination, which opens your integrations screen. With any other role you still see both, and clicking either one puts you on your home screen instead. Roles are set in team, roles and permissions.
How to search
Open search
Click
Search, the button at the right end of the header, from whatever screen you are on.Ctrl+Kdoes the same from anywhere in the PIM, or⌘Kon a Mac.Type what you are looking for
A box has replaced the page title at the top left, with your cursor already in it. Type at least 2 characters, because nothing is searched below that.
Read the list
Your results arrive together, in groups. Your own records come first, one group per kind, and the destinations you can jump to come after them.
Open the one you want
Click any row. The top row is already highlighted, so pressing
Enteropens the closest match without touching your mouse.
That is the whole flow. Opening a result closes search and opens the record or the screen you picked. Your search is added to a short list you see next time your box is empty.
Everything below explains what search reads, what each row is telling you, and where it stops. You do not need any of it to find a product by name.
Every option in detail
Opening and closing search
Search is at the right end of the header, past your page’s own controls and before the apps launcher, and it is there on every screen. Next to the word is a small key badge reading Ctrl+K, or ⌘K on a Mac. That badge is hidden on a phone, and the button itself is not.
Pressing that shortcut anywhere in the PIM opens search, and pressing it again closes it. So does Esc, and so does Close, the button to the right of the search box while search is open. All three put you back on the page you came from, and none of them keeps what you typed.
What you type is kept in the address bar as you type it. So a search is something you can bookmark or send to a teammate, and opening that address runs it again.
What search looks through
Search reads nine kinds of record in your catalog at the same time. Each kind gets its own group in the list, under a header naming it, and the groups always come back in this order.
Those nine group headers are always in English, whichever language you use the PIM in. Pages, Settings and Recent Searches follow your language normally, which is what makes the difference visible on a Spanish screen.
A file appears here only once its upload has finished, the same rule your asset library applies to itself. Start an upload and search for it a second later and it is not there yet.
What finds a product
Every identifier you have finds its product. Type a SKU, a barcode, an ISBN, a part number, an ASIN or the value of a custom identifier. Your product comes back. That is true for an identifier on any of the product’s variants. So a barcode you scanned is your fastest way to the product you want to edit, and identifiers covers all six types.
A variant never gets a row of its own. Search a SKU that is on one variant and you get the product above it, with the identifier you typed as that row’s second line.
A near miss still finds it. Accents are ignored, so cafe finds Café. One wrong letter is forgiven, so shrit finds a shirt. Two wrong letters in the same word is usually too far, and you get nothing.
Part of a word is enough. pho finds iPhone, wherever those letters are inside the name.
Everything a product search reads, and the one thing it does not
A product matches on its identifier values, its title, its description, its product type, and the names of the tags on it. Those count in that order, so a product whose title you typed comes above one that only mentions your words deep in its description.
What none of that reads is the label you gave a Custom identifier. Search reads the value, so a custom identifier labeled Warehouse code is found by the code itself and not by those two words.
Jumping to another screen
Alongside your records, search gives you a fixed short list of places in the PIM. They come back in two groups, Pages and Settings, and they always come below your own records.
A destination answers to what it is about, not only to its name. Each one has a few extra words that also match it. So csv and spreadsheet find Imports, dark mode and theme find Appearance, shopify and connections find Integrations, and kpi finds Home. Where a word could match a name and an extra word at the same time, the name comes first.
Those extra words are always English. The names themselves follow the language you use the PIM in, so on a Spanish screen Apariencia still answers to theme. One wrong letter is forgiven here too.
Recent searches
Open search and leave the box empty, and the list under it shows what you searched for before, under a group header reading Recent Searches.
A search is remembered only once you open one of its results. That keeps your list to the searches that worked, instead of a record of everything you have ever typed. Opening a destination counts too, so opening Appearance from search puts the word you typed on your list the same way opening a product does. Your last 10 searches are kept, newest at the top, and each one is dropped after 30 days.
Clicking a recent row puts that text back in your box and runs it again. It opens nothing, so a recent search is a shortcut to a search and never a shortcut to a record.
Clear all is on the right of the Recent Searches header and empties your whole list. Remove is on the right of each row and drops that one search.
Your recent searches are kept in the browser you are using, kept separately for each organization. They do not follow you to another computer, and no teammate ever sees them.
Moving through the list without the mouse
The top row is highlighted the moment your results arrive, so typing and then pressing Enter opens the closest match. Moving your mouse over a row moves the highlight onto it, which means the row under your cursor is the row Enter will open.
Those last three keys are printed along the bottom of the screen, in a strip that appears only once your list has something in it.
Limits
What search cannot do
What the result list shows you
Two things about the list surprise people the first time. It never gives you more than 8 rows of any one kind, and the number above it is not the number of matches you have.
The order the groups come in
Your own records come first, products at the top and assets at the bottom, in the fixed order of the nine-kind table further up this page. The two destination groups follow them. Inside a group the closest match is at the top, so the list is ordered by how well each row answers what you typed and not alphabetically.
Everything arrives at once. Search waits until you stop typing before it runs. It then keeps your whole list back until every part is ready, so you never watch one group appear and another follow a moment later.
What each row tells you
Every row shows a name on the left, with a second line under it. What that second line shows depends on the kind, and the nine-kind table further up this page says which.
A product row has two more things on the right. The price is the lowest among the product’s variants, always in your organization’s default currency, and a product with no price anywhere shows none. Beside it is the product’s status, in the same words your products table uses.
An integration row shows its provider’s logo on the left instead.
Eight per kind, and that is the whole list
Each of the nine groups gives you at most 8 rows, and there is nothing to click for the rest. There is no paging, no button for the whole set, and no way to tell search you only want products.
So a word matching 300 products gives you 8 of them. Those 8 are the closest matches rather than the first 300 cut short, which means a precise query still puts the right product on top. When 8 is not enough, either type something narrower or open the table for that kind and filter it. Products covers the filtering that search deliberately leaves alone.
The two counters
Above your list is a line reading how many results came back and how many milliseconds your search took. The same count appears again in the bottom right of the strip along the bottom of the screen.
Both of them count your records only, and they count them after the 8-per-group limit. On the query matching 300 products, both read 8. Neither one counts the Pages and Settings rows, so a search that finds nothing in your catalog and two destinations reads 0 with two rows under it.
When something goes wrong
When nothing comes back
No results found fills the screen whenever your list is empty. When you are sure the thing exists, four things account for almost all of it.
- It is a variant. Search its SKU and the product above it comes back in its place.
- It is behind the limit. A common word buries what you want under 7 closer matches, so type something narrower.
- The file is still uploading. An asset is findable once its upload finishes.
- It is not one of the nine kinds. Imports, exports, data sources, saved views and your teammates are not searched.
A second typo in the same word also misses, since one wrong letter is as far as a match goes.
One case looks like a failure and is not. At exactly 1 character you get No results found, because 2 is the floor and nothing has been searched yet. A second character brings your list back.
The states you can end up on
Something went wrong also covers being asked to slow down. Past 100 searches in a minute yours are rejected until that minute is out, and the message reads the same as any other failure. Typing alone will not get you there, because a search runs once you pause instead of once per key.