If you have a small osCommerce store and have a limited number of products added to the store, you might run into the problem that no search results show up when you type a product name or keyword in the search box. The message you would usually see says “oscommerce There is no product that matches the search criteria.

I ran into a similar problem recently when adding products to a small store for a client. The store had 6 products only, and each of them was manufactured by a different manufacturer. Since the products were related, I also did not add any categories or sub-categories to the web shop as I felt it was not needed. But this is where I went wrong.

Solution

If a product is not added to any category or sub-category, it will not show in the search results. So the solution to this problem is to simply make a dummy category, like “our products” and add all the products to that category.

This might sound like a really simple solution, but it works. You can simply hide the category box if you do not want to display it on the website.

If your products are not assigned to any category then they won’t come up in the search results, nor in the advanced search results.