Overview
The data that powers your storefront contains a lot of information, some of which could be quite sensitive. When working in the Field Settings module, it is important to exercise best practices in order to leverage your data to optimize conversions as well as protect your business from malicious intent. This article will briefly discuss how to achieve both.
The Field Settings module allows you to control what data fields are used by your website and how. The selections made here can have a large impact on the way your site functions and what information is available to the public. This means that there are significant risks in changing these settings, including:
- Exposing sensitive data such as inventory levels that would allow your competitors or data crawlers to predict your sales volume
- Increasing the size of your data footprint
- Affecting onsite functionality for features such as filters and search results
In short, do not change any of the Field Settings without a full understanding of the consequences of your actions. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or to our Customer Support team.
Sensitive Data
Some of the data used by your site to affect merchandising and experience may be considered sensitive. These can consist of inventory data, pricing, tags, category names, and more. Selecting the “Display” checkbox will make the corresponding data field visible in the API response, meaning that it could be visible to website users — including your competitors or to data crawlers looking to expose that information. As such, you must exercise extreme caution when enabling the "Display" checkbox for any data fields. Failure to do so may result in your sensitive information becoming available to anyone capable of finding it.
Data Footprint
When your website users interact with your data through actions like searches, navigating to category pages (PLPs), or clicking on a recommendation carousel, your website makes an API call to Searchspring. That API call triggers a response consisting of data from your Searchspring implementation. By selecting “Display”, “Sort”, “Filter”, “Display in Recs”, or “Recs Filter”, you are adding to the amount of data sent in each request. This can affect the speed of your website, leading to user experience issues, SEO ranking changes, and more. Weigh the benefits of adjusting your Field Settings against these effects before making any changes to the settings themselves.
Site Functionality
Your website is built to serve your customers, including features such as the data used for searching, filtering, sorting, and display. These features often rely on certain data fields to be available to your website in order to work properly. Selecting or de-selecting any field within the Field Settings module may cause your website features to stop working properly. We strongly recommend understanding which fields are being used in your implementation before making any changes to the Field Settings of your site.
The Field Settings module is a powerful and critical piece of your Searchspring implementation. The module should only be used by those who have a comprehensive understanding of the website’s features and functionality. Should you have any questions about these, please contact your Customer Success Manager, or reach out to our Customer Support team for further assistance before making any adjustments.
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