Fetchie doesn’t need WooCommerce — it’s a full site search on any WordPress site. But when WooCommerce is active, Fetchie understands the thing that trips up most store search: product variations. This page explains the variation roll-up and what it means for how your store searches.
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The Problem With Variations
A variable product — say, a hoodie in four colours and five sizes — is really one product page and twenty variation records underneath it. Each variation can carry its own SKU, its own attribute values, its own description. Visitors search for those details constantly: a customer re-ordering types the SKU from their old invoice; someone else types “hoodie red xl”.
Search that ignores variations misses those searches. Search that indexes variations as separate results does something worse: twenty near-identical entries for one hoodie, none of them the actual product page.
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The Roll-Up: One Product, Everything Searchable
Fetchie takes a third path. Each variable product is indexed as one document that includes every variation’s details:
- The parent product’s SKU and short description
- The product’s attribute values (colours, sizes, materials — both taxonomy attributes and custom ones)
- Each variation’s SKU, attribute values, and description
So searching a variation SKU, or “hoodie red xl”, finds the parent product page — the page with the variation picker, the add-to-cart button, the photos. And because the rolled-up text is part of the document itself, the result’s snippet can show the matched SKU right there in the search results, which is a quiet little reassurance for the re-ordering customer.
Variations never appear as separate results. Not as duplicates, not as bare variation pages a visitor can’t do anything with. They only ever count toward their parent.
A couple of tidy details: a variation whose SKU matches the parent’s isn’t repeated (no artificial inflation of that SKU’s relevance), and variations that would contribute identical text are collapsed to one line rather than counted again and again.
Simple products don’t need any of this — they index normally from their own pages, SKU and short description included.
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Products Rank Where Shoppers Expect
On a store, Fetchie gives products a ranking nudge above other content — so searching a product name finds the product first, and the blog post about the product second. Pages sit slightly above posts for the same reason.
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Keeping It Fresh
Editing a variation refreshes the parent product’s search document automatically — change a variation’s SKU or description and the roll-up updates with it. Everything on The search index applies to products too: publish and it’s in, unpublish and it’s out.
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The Toggle
The roll-up is the WooCommerce variation roll-up feature at Tracksies > Settings > Features — on by default whenever WooCommerce is active. With it off, products still index normally from their own pages; you just lose the variation-level searchability. The toggle only appears (and only matters) when WooCommerce is installed.
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Without WooCommerce
Nothing to configure and nothing missing: Fetchie simply doesn’t offer products as an indexable type, and every other part of the plugin — ranked results, snippets, jump links, insights, the digest — works identically. If you add WooCommerce later, the product type appears on the Index tab ready to be switched on.
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Related
- The search index — how documents are built and kept fresh
- How search results work — ranking and snippets
- Insights — see which products people search for most