Appearance
Search results
The storefront has two search surfaces: the live suggestions that drop down as a buyer types, and the full results page they land on after submitting. Both look at product title, product type, variant title, vendor, and variant SKU, but they narrow differently — see SKU matching below before you tell buyers to search by part number.
Predictive suggestions
As a buyer types in the header search, a panel shows matching search terms, products, collections, and pages. Product rows carry a thumbnail, and — depending on your settings — the vendor and price.
Control the panel under Theme settings → Search:
- Enable predictive search — when off, the search bar submits straight to the results page with no dropdown.
- Show vendor in suggestions
- Show price in suggestions
Header search suggestions, controlled under Theme settings → Search.
SKU matching
The dropdown is the precise surface. It asks Shopify's predictive search to match on SKU, so pasting a full part number such as WP-PPP-BLA-S returns that one product. The quick order page uses the same lookup, which is why it's the right page for buyers ordering off a part-number list.
The full results page is looser. Shopify's /search endpoint splits the query into tokens and matches any of them, so a part number returns every product sharing a token — on our demo catalog WP-PPP-BLA-S returns the whole catalog, with the exact product third. The right product is in the list, but the list isn't narrowed to it.
Note
This is how Shopify's search endpoint tokenizes, not a theme setting, and it's why the theme points buyers at the dropdown and the quick order page for part numbers. Tell buyers who work from style numbers to use either of those rather than submitting the search.
Note
With login-gated pricing on, suggestion prices are hidden for signed-out visitors even when Show price in suggestions is on.
The full results page
Submitting the search opens the results page. Products render as the same product cards used on collections, grouped above matching articles and pages. A View all results link at the bottom of the suggestions panel goes to the same page.
Set Results per page on the Search results section to choose how many results appear before pagination — 8 to 48, default 24. The count covers products, articles, and pages together, not each group separately.
The results page carries the same filter panel and sort menu as a collection, drawn from Search & Discovery. Both are on by default under the Search results section, as Enable filtering and Enable sorting.
The sidebar renders only when the search itself exposes filters. With Enable filtering on but no filters configured in Search & Discovery, the results page shows no sidebar rather than an empty one. Once filters exist, the sidebar and the result count stay on screen even when a filter narrows the results to zero, so a buyer can untick it. See Filtering and sorting.