Items
Your catalog inside VeryQuery: what an item is, how it gets in, the state you'll see it in on the Items page, and what each surface does.
What an item is
An item is one searchable unit. For most stores that's a product, but you decide the grain. A jacket sold in three colors can be one item ("Linen blazer") or three items ("Linen blazer, navy", "Linen blazer, cream", "Linen blazer, olive"), depending on whether you want each color to surface as its own match in search.
An item has a title, a description, optional metadata, and zero or more images. None of those fields are required on their own, but you need enough text or imagery for the match to be meaningful. A title alone is usually fine; titles plus descriptions are better; structured metadata (vendor, type, tags) helps too.
How items get in
Two routes, depending on how you connect to VeryQuery.
- Shopify sync
- Once your store is connected, your full catalog flows in automatically. Creating, editing, or deleting a product in Shopify reaches VeryQuery within seconds. See Shopify for setup.
- Direct API
- POST to /v1/items for one item, or send a batch in a single call. Use this if you're integrating without Shopify, or alongside Shopify for items that aren't products. The API docs at docs.veryquery.com have the full reference.
You can also add a single item by hand from the dashboard. Click Add item on the Items page and fill in the form. Useful for testing, or for one-off additions to a Shopify-synced catalog.
Status
Every item is in one of four states. The Status panel at the top of the Items page shows the count in each, and clicking a count filters the list below it.
- Ready
- Fully processed. The item is live in search and appears in results.
- Processing
- A new item we haven't finished preparing yet. It won't appear in search until processing completes. For most items this takes a few seconds; large catalogs ingesting in bulk can take a minute or two before the queue clears.
- Updating
- An existing ready item whose content changed (a title or description edit, for example). The old version stays live in search while the new one is prepared, so shoppers never see an empty result during an update.
- Needs attention
- Processing failed after retries. The item is not in search. Common causes are content the system couldn't parse meaningfully (empty title and description, garbled text). Open the item to see the specific error and edit or re-save to retry.
Finding items
Use the filter box above the table to find by title or item ID. Filtering is partial-match and updates as you type. The status filter and the find filter combine, so you can search just within Ready items, just within Needs attention, and so on.
The list paginates 50 items at a time. Scrolling to the bottom loads more.
Drill into an item
Each row in the table links to per-item views.
- Edit
- Change the title, description, metadata, or images. Saving puts the item into the Updating state until the change is reflected in search.
- Metrics
- How often this item shows up in shopper search results. Shows the queries it matches most, with frequency.
- Intelligence
- A per-item read of where it sits in your catalog: how it's categorized, which traits we infer from it, and how it performs against shopper demand. See Intelligence for the bigger picture.
Catalog limits
Each plan caps the number of items you can keep live in your catalog. The current cap and your usage are shown on the Billing page. When you reach the cap, new items submitted for ingest are held until you either remove existing items or move up a tier; updates to items already in the catalog keep flowing without interruption. The dashboard nudges you at 80% and again at 95% so the wall doesn't surprise you.