Clarity eCommerce Framework has a built-in advanced Search capability that is an Elastic Search-backed catalog query and faceted filtering system that ensures a better user search experience. Buyers type a keyword query (a SKU, a manufacturer part number, a generic term, a spec) and the platform returns results from an Elastic Search index that knows every product's name, description, category, attribute values, brand, and contracted price. From there, six out-of-the-box filter facets narrow the result set: Search Terms, Product Rating, Category, Custom Attribute, Price Range, and Brand . Stacked alongside those six are dynamically-generated facets fed by any product Attribute flagged “Use as Catalog Filter,” giving you an unbounded surface for industry-specific filtering. Voltage on electrical, Material on industrial, Diameter on plumbing, Compliance Class on medical. All without custom development.
B2B changes the entire game, including the search filters. The B2B differentiator is what the Price Range filter does. In a consumer cart, a Price Range slider filters against the public list price. In Clarity, the slider operates against the logged-in customer's contracted prices: tier, contract, account-specific override, whatever the Multi-Tiered Pricing engine resolves for that buyer. A contractor on a 30% discount filtering “under $500” sees products under their $500, not under list's $500. That single behavior keeps the catalog honest to the deal you actually signed.
77% of potential buyers that search and don't find what they're looking for, leave your site and never return (Google study). THAT is why this is such an important element. Advanced Search sits inside a broader catalog experience that includes Product Catalog browsing, Content Management -driven category landing pages, SEO-friendly URLs , and Sub-Category Carousels. All of them share the same Elastic Search index and the same six-plus-N filter facet set: one query engine, one filter language, one consistent navigation pattern across catalog, category pages, and dedicated search results.
A consumer browses for inspiration. A B2B buyer arrives with a part number, a spec, a deadline, and a contracted price already in their head, and they want the catalog to match all four. Generic search rails fall apart on the second filter, the third synonym, and the first time someone with a contract price uses a slider tied to list.
Wrench, spanner, hex key, Allen, “PN-1234,” legacy ERP code, the abbreviated nickname the warehouse uses. Without synonym expansion, four of those five searches return empty results, even though the SKU is right there in the catalog.
A buyer with a 30% contract discount sets the Price Range slider to “under $500” expecting to see what they can actually afford. A list-price slider hides every product priced $500–$715 that contract puts in their budget. They quietly close the tab.
Electrical buyers filter on Voltage. Plumbing buyers filter on Diameter. Medical buyers filter on Compliance Class. A catalog that hard-codes its filter rail forces every industry into a generic facet set and loses the specificity that actually closes deals.
A buyer stacks Category → Brand → Voltage and hits Search, only to land on “0 results.” Without live facet counts that update as each filter is added, every click is a gamble and every empty page costs a session.
If the search index doesn't stay in lock-step with the ERP (new SKUs, deleted SKUs, renamed categories, retired brands, repriced contracts), the storefront silently drifts and buyers start finding products that no longer ship or pricing that no longer applies.
A buyer hunting the cheapest in-stock option wants Price Low → High. The next session they're comparison shopping and want Rating. The next they want Newest. Catalogs that lock a single sort default force every buyer into the same mental model.
The cost of inaction is real. Industry analyses of B2B catalog search consistently find that a high single-digit percentage of sessions end in a query that returned zero results when it should have returned something, usually because of synonym gaps, list-price filtering, or stale indexes. Each one of those sessions is an unfilled cart, a phone-in to the sales desk, or a buyer who quietly defaulted to a competitor. Advanced Search doesn't guarantee every search finds the right product, but it removes the four or five reasons most B2B catalogs fail.
Six platform capabilities that turn catalog search from a single text box into a working B2B discovery experience: the right facets, the right synonyms, the right prices, and the right counts.
Elastic Search powers the catalog query layer. SKUs, product names, descriptions, attribute values, category assignments, brand, and contracted prices are all indexed and queryable. Search returns at storefront speed even at millions of SKUs.
Search Terms, Product Rating, Category, Custom Attribute, Price Range, and Brand ship with the platform out of the box. No plug-ins, no extensions, no extra licensing. Toggle each on per storefront and per category as needed.
Flag any product Attribute “Use as Catalog Filter” and the storefront automatically renders a new filter facet populated with the distinct values present in your indexed products. Voltage, Material, Compliance Class: ship a new filter with no code.
The Price Range filter respects the logged-in customer's contracted prices, not list. A buyer on Tier B sees Tier-B numbers in the slider and filters against those bounds. Consumer-grade carts simply cannot match that behavior.
Synonym groups expand queries to cover the way buyers actually type: “wrench / spanner,” “hex / Allen,” legacy part numbers, regional terms, post-acquisition catalog merges. Configurable per language and per storefront.
Filter counts update live as buyers stack facets so no one lands on an empty page. Configurable sort orders (Relevance, Price, Rating, Newest, Best Sellers) and pagination round out the catalog UX.
One catalog, one index, one source of truth. Product data, categories, attribute values, brands, and contracted prices originate in your ERP or PIM and flow into the Clarity eCommerce catalog through Clarity Connect: SAP S/4HANA / ECC, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central / F&O, Sage Intacct / X3, Acumatica, Epicor Kinetic, Infor CloudSuite / M3, SYSPRO, and 17+ more. The Elastic Search index sits in front of that catalog, so the storefront stays fast and queryable while the back-end systems remain authoritative. Update a price or a category in the ERP, and the storefront facets reflect it.
A walkthrough of the catalog filter overview: the six OOTB facets, the Configurable-Attribute filters, how synonyms expand a keyword query, and how live counts keep buyers from landing on an empty result page.
Seven steps from confirming the Elastic Search index to validating that buyers see tier-aware prices in the filter slider.
In the Admin Portal, confirm Elastic Search is indexing your product catalog. SKUs, names, descriptions, attribute values, category assignments, brand, and contracted-price tiers are all crawled and tokenized into the search index so storefront queries return at sub-second latency.
The catalog ships with Search Terms, Product Rating, Category, Custom Attribute, Price Range, and Brand filters out of the box. Toggle each on for the storefronts and category pages where you want it to appear. No plug-ins, no add-on licensing.
On any product Attribute, set “Use as Catalog Filter” to true and the storefront will automatically generate a new filter facet for that attribute: Voltage, Material, Compliance Class, Diameter, Color, anything you track on a product. The facet auto-populates with the distinct values present in your indexed SKUs.
Add synonym groups (“wrench / spanner,” “hex / Allen,” “PN / part number,” legacy SKU → current SKU) so the Elastic Search query expands matches across the way every buyer actually types. Configure per language and per storefront where you operate multi-region.
The Price Range filter respects the logged-in customer's contracted prices, not list. A buyer on Tier B sees Tier-B prices in the slider and filters against those numbers. This is the B2B differentiator versus consumer-grade catalog search, and it works the moment Customer-Specific Pricing is configured.
Configure default sort orders (Relevance, Price Low → High, Price High → Low, Rating, Newest, Best Sellers) and pagination size. Buyers can override per session in the storefront, and their preference is remembered for the duration of the visit.
Walk a category page and watch filter counts update live as you stack facets. A buyer narrowing Category → Brand → Voltage → Price Range sees the result count tick down at every step, so they never click into an empty page. Validate that synonyms expand correctly and that the Price Range slider shows the right buyer's tier.
Getting Advanced Search right doesn't just polish the catalog UX. It changes how often buyers find what they came for, how much your sales desk gets paged for “can't find it” calls, and how confident the catalog feels at scale.
Synonym expansion, dynamic facets, and live filter counts mean fewer empty result pages and fewer abandoned sessions. Buyers who found the right product the first time are buyers who didn't need to call the sales desk to find it.
A contract buyer's slider operates against their contract prices, not list. The catalog never hides product they could actually afford, and the buyer trusts what they see. That trust translates into orders placed online instead of calls to the sales desk.
Configurable-Attribute filters mean an electrical distributor ships a Voltage filter, a plumbing supply ships a Diameter filter, and a medical reseller ships a Compliance-Class filter. Same platform for all three, no code required.
Faceted navigation surfaces product that keyword search alone would miss. A buyer who lands on Category, then Brand, then Voltage discovers SKUs they never would have typed a query for. That browsing path is exactly how distributor catalogs grow share-of-wallet.
Because product data, prices, and category assignments flow through Clarity Connect from your ERP / PIM, the Elastic Search index never drifts. New SKUs appear, retired SKUs disappear, repriced contracts re-rank, all without anyone touching the storefront.
Every “can't find it” call your sales desk takes is a search that should have worked. Synonyms, dynamic facets, and tier-aware pricing remove the three or four reasons most of those calls happen, freeing your sales team to focus on real selling.
The personas who benefit span every side of the catalog: buyers find the SKU they came for on the first or second search instead of the fifth, procurement teams filter against the contract prices they actually pay, not list, sales desks field fewer “can't find it” calls and more real questions, catalog managers ship new filter facets by flagging an attribute instead of opening a ticket, and your storefront analytics finally show you which facets buyers actually use, so you can tune the catalog to match the way your customers shop.
Schedule a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll show Advanced Search running against a sandbox of your own SKUs and attribute values: the six OOTB facets live, Configurable-Attribute filters generated from your data, synonyms wired to how your buyers search, and the Price Range slider operating against contracted prices for a sample tier. Elastic backend, live facet counts, configurable sort orders. Already built in.
