Prestashop search

[tony84]

Ive just thought of something which i think could be really useful.

I have a shop which gets a fair amount of hits but a very small conversion rate. I have a search feature on my site, now presuming people are using it - if this was to log what people are searching for then it could help me stock what people are after.

Does anyone know if there is such a thing around?

[WPsites]

Sounds like a good idea. Most eCommerce platforms seem to ignore this data which I'm sure could be very informative.

It would be quite simple to implement. I recon I could carry out the necessary modifications to do basic logging (time/date, search term) and make the log viewable, in about 30 mins.

[tony84]

how much would you be looking at for that?

[WPsites]

It's a small job and hardly seems worth you getting your cheque book out. I could complete the job later today. I will send you my contact details via pm.

[CS-Cart]

Yep, search quality is very important in modern CMS systems and shopping carts (while Prestashop does actually provide a decent search). Could you share the address of your store with us so it would be easier to provide recommendations?

[edmondscommerce]

yep log searches, + use SEO URLs for your search results + optimise your search results pages + create a tag cloud or similar + dump all your search results pages to a google sitemap = longtail SEO 101

Magento does a lot of this stuff out of teh box

[CS-Cart]

Sure, it's all correct, but what you mean is more related to SEO than conversion optimization. Again, it's quite hard to say anything without knowing which store is meant.

[tony84]

The whole SEO thing is a good idea and something potentially i will look at in the future.

Initially im just trying to make subtle changes and move forward slowly just until i get to grips with it and get a bit more money behind me.

Thanks to sdinternet though he has done exactly what i was after.

[edmondscommerce]

ah yeah sorry didnt read the first post properly :-)

glad you got it sorted.

[WPsites]

After a number of PM's I have decided to share my solution with everyone. It's not a contribution/module as such, it's just a crude yet effective way to quickly log the searches performed on your website.

If you paste the below code into the search.php file. Paste it in around line 30, just after '$search = new Search();'.

Then whenever someone does a search it will get logged to a text file. Delete the file using FTP if it gets too big and it will just get recreated again.

You just access the text file via the web (yourwebsite address /textFileName.txt). Rename the text file slightly in the code below to make sure nobody else can find the log file.

Hope that can be of some help to you guys.



//BASIC SEARCH LOG
$fh = fopen("searchlogRENAME.txt", 'a');
$stringData = date("d/m/Y h:i:s")." - $query \n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);

[MH1]

Thanks for sharing your work, very generous of you.

[Stampy]

I was one of the many PMs, so would like to publicly say thanks. Very good of you to share.

[edmondscommerce]

simple and effective :-)