Disable availability filtering

If your catalog entity contains availability channels and your commerce interface allows customers to disable availability filtering, also known as the ability to view products from all availability channels at once, you can use the AvailabilityFilterStrategy parameter to ensure that all products are returned in search results.

By default, if your catalog entity uses availability channels, only products referenced in at least one availability channel will be displayed.

Changing the filter strategy ensures that all products matching the search criteria are displayed, even if no ec_availability_id is specified. This feature allows customers who disabled availability filtering to access the entire product inventory, regardless of whether the products are referenced in availability channels or not.

Whether this may apply to your website search interface depends entirely on your use case. It can be enabled after the catalog configuration.

Example

A retailer sets up their catalog configuration and doesn’t have availability objects that contain all their products, regardless of location. By changing the AvailabilityFilterStrategy, a user would be able to query the products made available by the catalog entity without a store location.

How to change the availability filter strategy

Currently, you can only disable availability filters through the REST API. You’ll need to modify the AvailabilityFilterStrategy option in the catalog configuration. By default, the option is set to ALWAYS and will only return items that have availabilities. When changed to WHEN_SPECIFIED, it will only filter by availability, if an availability is specified in the search request. Otherwise, it won’t filter by availabilities.