Search results of variants

[dreamingdigital]

I want customers to be able to use the search and enter a product code or sku of a variant. How would this be setup? Variants are inactive so they won't show up in searches.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

But the variant codes in the description field of the main product enclosed in html comments so they don't appear on the page itself. <!-- variant code goes here , and here , etc -->

[dreamingdigital]

Thanks Bruce. I appreciate the help. I was looking for something that would make the variant show up in the result.
Here is what we did:
We decided to not deactivate the variants but leave them active. Then on the product page we added code at the top that looks up the master product and 301 redirects the browser there and selects the appropriate variant checkbox as well. We had to use a custom site map template to not include these variant skus but the end result should be very user friendly for the customer and customer service can get customers to type in variant sku/product codes into the search, see the actual product.

[afiumano]

We also want to add the ability to let customers search by the variant sku. Are there any other solutions for this yet?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Nope. Those are the two options. Putting the variant skus into the product description can be done programmatically BTW by any decent Miva Integrator/Developer.

[afiumano]

Would creating a custom field for them also work similar to adding the comment into the description and then turning on that custom field in the search settings? Which way: description or custom field is more 'efficient' for rendering the pages and for faster search?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

yup.