Limitations of Commerce Search v3

  • Updated

Commerce Search v3 for Optimizely Configured Commerce does not support some features, while other features are supported with limitations.

Unsupported features

Commerce Search v3 does not support the following features:

  • Customer-specific part number search – Google Vertex AI does not currently support searches with customer-specific part numbers assigned at the customer level. However, customers can still use Quick Order to search for customer-specific part numbers because Quick Order uses a different API intended to be a part number ordering system, instead of a relevancy search.
  • Search within
  • Instant attributes sync
  • Mobile App (will be supported in the future)
  • Partner local development – Commerce Search v3 does not currently support local development and comes with certain limitations. Work is underway to explore options that may enable limited local testing against sandbox instances; however, the overall feasibility is still under review. You and your partner should use sandbox environments for testing and development purposes at this time.
  • Sponsored/pinning products 

Supported with limitations

The following features are supported with limitations:

  • Child product and variant restrictions – When Commerce Search v3 is the search provider, the Hide selected products restriction, when applied to a variant, automatically applies to its primary/parent product by design. As a result, this restriction cannot be managed at a granular level for variants. You should not use this restriction on variants, and if necessary, apply it only to the parent product.
  • Attributes (facets) – Commerce Search v3 can only supply a limited number of facets on search requests, which limits the use of facets for category browsing only. You should use dynamic facets to support both searches and category browsing.
  • Boosting by purchase history – This should be supported by having Google Vertex Al learn from user events. More testing is necessary to validate this.
  • Product specifications – This requires crawlers to pick up specs from Product Detail pages and Google Vertex Al to know these product specifications.
  • CMS – Only Spire sites are supported. Classic sites are not supported.

  • Autocomplete – Autocomplete does not provide suggestions for specific products or website content. Instead, it supports returning the following types of suggestions:

    • Search term suggestions
    • Categories – Popular and suggested categories
    • Brands – Popular and suggested brands

    If your users expect product names or website content in autocomplete, you would need to implement a custom solution, which could be outside of Google's recommended flow.

Regional Availability

Commerce Search v3 is currently hosted from the North America region. Support for non-North America regions is not available at this time. Expansion to additional regions is under consideration for future updates.