Search

How customers find a restaurant: the filter bar you arrange, autocomplete, and how many results fill a page.

Admin → Settings → Search

The filter bar

Ten controls ship on the restaurant listing, and this screen decides which appear and in what order — drag them into the arrangement you want.

Leave the arrangement blank and the shipped order applies.

The filter bar arranger with the ten controls
The filter bar arranger. Click to enlarge.
ControlLets a customer
SearchType a name.
LocationChoose a city or area.
RadiusSet how far they will travel.
CuisineBrowse by cuisine — from Classifications.
TagsFilter by food type or store type.
AvailabilityShow only what is open now.
DietaryFilter by dish attributes — from Menu.
Price rangeCap what they will spend.
Sort byReorder the results.
Minimum ratingHide anything below a star threshold.
Order matters more than count. Customers use the first two or three controls and ignore the rest. Put the one your platform is actually organised around — cuisine on a varied marketplace, location on a city-wide one — at the front, and cut anything that would return nothing.

A filter needs data behind it

Every one of these reads records you own. Dietary finds nothing unless restaurants have tagged dishes; Cuisine is thin until your cuisine list is real; Minimum rating is meaningless before you have reviews. A filter offering an empty result set is worse than no filter — see Classifications.

Autocomplete & paging

  1. Autocomplete — suggest matching restaurants as a visitor types.
  2. Minimum characters — how much they must type first. 2 to 6.
  3. Results shown — how many suggestions appear. 1 to 20.
  4. Restaurants per page — how many appear before paging.
The autocomplete card with each setting numbered
Autocomplete and paging. Click to enlarge.

Two or three characters is the usual minimum; six or eight results is plenty. Twelve to twenty restaurants per page is the ordinary range.

When it doesn't work

A filter finds nothing

The data behind it is missing rather than the filter being broken. Dietary reads dish attributes, which restaurants apply per dish from the list at Admin → Menu → Attributes; Cuisine reads each restaurant’s cuisine, set at Admin → Restaurants.

A filter I removed is still on the page

Save, then reload the storefront. The arrangement is read when the listing renders.

Autocomplete shows nothing

The visitor has typed fewer than the minimum characters, or nothing matches. It suggests restaurants, not dishes.

Results feel wrong

Check the sort control is present — without it, customers cannot reorder and are stuck with the default.