Storefront search

How customers can search your store

There are two sideboxes which permit your visitors to search your store - the search.php sidebox (shown left) and the search_header.php sidebox (on the right). The former is designed to be shown on the left or right sidebar, where the latter is designed for positioning in the store’s header.


Search Sidebox
Search Header Sidebox


The link in the search.php sidebox to the Advanced Search page goes to a screen that looks like this:

Advanced Search Page

Advanced Search

The advanced search page allows visitors to narrow their search to only specific categories, manufacturers, price ranges, and product creation dates. This can be useful for stores with a large number of SKUs.

The contents of the keywords field is used to search the following fields:

Table Fields
products products_model
products_description products_description 1
manufacturers manufacturers_name
meta_tags_products_description metatags_description 2

You can see the database schema if you wish to learn more about how the database is structured.

The Search in Product Descriptions checkbox is provided because sometimes searching the product description produces false positive search results.

If the configuration setting SKIP_SINGLE_PRODUCT_CATEGORIES is true, and a search returns a single value, the product listing page will be bypassed and the product info page will be displayed for the resulting product.


  1. if the Search in Product Descriptions checkbox is checked, or if the search is done from one of the search sideboxes. ↩︎

  2. if the configuration setting Include meta-tags in product search? is set to true↩︎




Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified January 16, 2021 by Scott C Wilson (bc91ba4).