Search Engine Optimization

The Propcart search engine provides fast and relevant search results for your customers.

Typo Tolerance

Typos are inevitable, and our search engine is forgiving.

• Industry-specific Synonyms: If an item has the keyword couch (and not sofa) and someone searches for sofa, those couch items will be included in the search results. Are we missing a synonym? Let us know!
• Exact Match Queries: Wrap "your query" in quotes to get exact matches and disable typo tolerance.
• Negative Keywords: Prepend a hyphen to a word in a query to exclude items that contain this word from the search results. For example, the query -table lamp will exclude all items that contain the keyword "table".
• GeoLocation: Have warehouses in different cities? Your customers will see items closest to them first by default, or they can change their location to rank that location highest.

Searchable Attributes

These item attributes are searched and ranked in the following order:

• Title
• Tags
• SKU
• SKUs
• Description
• Storage Location
• Vendor Name*

_{^{\* For the Propcart Marketplace}}

Ranking Strategy

When a query is submitted to the search engine, the results are ranked as follows:

Typos: Results with more typos will be ranked lower.

GeoLocation: Geo-tagged results are ranked by distance to the user's geolocation, closest first. This is used on the Propcart Marketplace and prop houses with multiple locations (e.g. Los Angeles and New York City).

Match Count: Number of words from the query that matched at least once.

Proximity: How physically near are the matching query of words in the item.

Position: Position of the matching words in the Searchable Attributes list. The closer the matching words are to the beginning of the attribute, the higher the ranking.

tip

When describing your inventory, put the most relevant information at the beginning. Usually this means putting nouns first and adjectives second like Lounge Chair, Eames, 1970s.

Exact: Number of query words matching exactly.

Rank: -100 to 100 determined by our ranking scoring (see below).

Rank Scoring

Every item gets scored from -100 to 100 using their visibility setting with an optional boost based on their performance and creation date.

Base Ranking

Visibility	Points
Featured	80
Public - High	60
Public	40
Public - Low	20
Public - Bottom	0
Private	-40
To Review	-70
Archived	-100

Within their Visibility group, newer items are ranked first, oldest last.

Smart Ranking

Paid subscribers can enable Smart Rank in their Inventory Settings.

When enabled, public items can earn up to 20 points for Performance and Newness added to their Base Rank. Scores are recalculated weekly.

Performance Boost (max +20)

Rewards items that perform well on your site. Signals include:

• Favorites
• Quote requests (lead rate is smoothed using views)
• Orders
• Revenue

These signals are normalized (so one outlier doesn’t dominate) and combined. Higher-performing items rank higher within their Visibility group.

Newness Boost (max +10)

New items start with a small temporary lift so they’re not buried before they collect data.

• Cap: up to +10 points
• Decay: 30-day half-life (about +1.25 remains after 90 days; near 0 by ~6 months)
• Exposure brake: the boost fades faster as an item accumulates views

Ranking Notes & Tips

• Private, To Review and Archived items don’t receive boosts and have negative base scores; only public items are eligible for Smart Rank boosts.
• Smart Rank never overrides your Visibility order; it helps choose which items surface within each Visibility bucket.
• We use smoothing to avoid "small sample" spikes (e.g., 1 quote / 1 view).
• If you turn Smart Rank off, items are ordered by Visibility with creation date (newest first) as a tiebreaker.
• You can view an item's rank on its Activity Tab under Stats.

Synonyms

Our search engine supports synonyms, which tell the search engine which words and expressions to consider equal.

For example, sofas ↔ couches. A search for "couches" also returns "sofas", and a search for "sofas" also returns "couches".

It also supports synonym groups like:

white boards ↔ whiteboards ↔ grease boards ↔ greaseboards ↔ dry erase boards ↔ erase boards ↔ wipe away boards

Synonyms come in three flavors:

• Regular Synonyms: if you want a word or phrase to find its synonyms and the other way around.
• One-way Synonyms: if you want a word or phrase to find its synonyms but not the reverse.
• Alternative Corrections: if you want records with an exact query match to rank higher than a synonym match.

We have many synonyms defined for props, but we're always adding and improving our list. Please let us know if we're missing any.