Why Is My Product Missing?

There are a number of reasons a product may not be showing up when you expect it to. Please review the scenarios below to help identify the cause. 

Case 1: Product not being received by Athos Commerce

If you are generating your own feed file to send us, try downloading and reviewing the file to determine if the product appears in the data. If the product does appear in the data or you don't have access to this data, move on to Case 2 below. 

Possible Causes:

• Product doesn't exist: Ensure the product exists in your ecommerce store and is included in your feed export process
• Server caching: The feed file we're grabbing is being cached on your server, so it isn't being updated. Make sure your server's caching is disabled for the feed file. 

Volusion caching

If you are using Volusion as your ecommerce platform, note that Volusion only updates products for their All Products API at midnight U.S. Central Standard Time. Any changes that happen before they update Athos cannot be fetched. If you wish to run it earlier, you can manually update the All Products API in Volusion and then run Athos's index. The steps are outlined below:

1. Log in to Volusion admin
2. Go to Inventory > Import/Export.
3. Click on the Volusion API tab.
4. Click the "Reset" button next to All Products.
5. Log in to the Athos Search & Product Discovery console.
6. Click the Index Status link on the top right.
7. Click the "Update Index" button.

Case 2: Product not being synced (indexed) to Athos

1. Find your site's ID at the top left drop-down under "SITE":
   
2. Go to this URL: https://docs.athoscommerce.com/reference/get-search-results
3. If there are no results ("totalResults":0), that means the product is not being saved to Athos.

Possible Causes:

1. Exclude Rule: Some sites ask Athos to set up a special Exclude Rule that will skip saving any products to our servers for certain criteria (example: price=0). To check this:
   1. Go to https://console.athoscommerce.net/data-configurations/data-transformations?tab=record and if you see any class transformation of "Exclude", this indicates that you have an exclude rule
   2. Go to https://console.athoscommerce.net/data-connectors/data-sources if your feed source has any setting to exclude out-of-stock products.

Case 3: Product being hidden

It's possible that the product is being synced but then hidden from view. Athos will often skip saving products that are set as "hidden" or a similar status. Make sure the product hasn't been set as "discontinued", "hidden", etc. in your ecommerce platform.

Go to Search Preview and search for the name of the product in question. If the product doesn't show up, but it did show up in the Case 2 check (above), it's possible that the product is being hidden.

Possible Causes:

• Removed via Merchandising: Check if the product was removed in a merchandising campaign (especially campaigns that apply broadly like the Default Campaign). In Visual Merchandising:
  
• Background Filter: If you have a background filter set up, it could be filtering out the product in certain contexts. If the search query for the background filter is empty, it applies to every search on your site! Please contact your customer success representative if you suspect you may have any background filters in place. 
• Integration Background Filter: Some sites have asked us to automatically filter some requests on their site through special installed logic in the front-end integration of the site. Often, this is to show different behavior on Category vs. Search pages, Logged-in Users vs. Non Logged-in Users, or other cases.

Case 4: Relevancy matching

If the product is still appearing when searching for it by name, but not in some search contexts, the cause is likely related to relevancy. 

Possible Causes:

• Not all search terms found: Our search requires that every single word a user searches for should be found in a product's searchable data. Example: A product has "purple" in one field and "dress" in another, but it doesn't have "trendy". In this scenario, a search for "purple dress" will find it, but a search for "trendy purple dress" will not.
• Field not searchable / indexed: If your product has "color: purple" and you want people to find it by searching "purple", then the "color" field should be marked "Search" on the Field Settings page. 
• Partial words: Athos does not match on partial words. A shopper searching for "tren" will not match a product with "trendy".
• Specific terms not found: If you'd like to be able to find products by searching specific words, you need to ensure those words are in the product's searchable data. Adding "trendy" to a searchable "keywords" field may be a good idea if you want people to find the product by searching for "trendy".
• Search Configurations: Check your search configurations to ensure that none of them are altering your search results unfavorably: Ignore Terms, Query Replacements, Exact Matches, or Redirects.