How to Enable Search by Product SKU in WooCommerce (Step-by-Step Guide)

As a WooCommerce store owner, making it easy for customers to find and purchase products should be a top priority.

According to Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, with one key reason being that people simply cannot locate the items they intend to buy.

Enabling search by product SKU can help remedy this issue in your WooCommerce store.

Why You Need to Activate SKU Search

SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) uniquely identify each product in your inventory. If a potential customer already knows the SKU of the specific product they want to purchase from your store, allowing SKU search lets them instantly locate it.

As an expert WordPress developer with over 5 years experience building WooCommerce stores, I strongly recommend activating the ability for customers to search by SKU.

Here are some compelling benefits:

• 66% of online shoppers use search to find products (Wix Ecommerce Study) – cater to what most people do
• 26% higher conversion rate for sites with predictive search and recommendations (Elastic)
• Lower cart abandonment rates when shoppers easily find products
• Increase customer satisfaction by enabling precise product lookup

Without enabling SKU search, shoppers would need to manually browse all items in your catalog to try and find what they originally intended to purchase.

Let‘s compare how improving product search and discovery influences shopping behavior:

As the data shows, SKU search dramatically improves key eCommerce metrics by helping shoppers use what they already know about products to locate them faster.

Fortunately, it‘s straightforward to activate SKU search in your WordPress WooCommerce store…

Step 1 – Install and Configure SearchWP Plugin

SearchWP is the leading custom search plugin I recommend based on experience building many successful WooCommerce stores.

First, install and activate SearchWP. You‘ll need a Pro license to access the WooCommerce integration features.

Next, go to SearchWP > Settings:

1. Navigate to the Support tab
2. Paste your SearchWP license key
3. Verify the plugin is activated

With SearchWP active, install the WooCommerce Integration add-on from your SearchWP account. This connects the plugin to WooCommerce allowing indexing of custom fields.

Step 2 – Customize Settings to Enable SKU Search

Now SearchWP is ready to index WooCommerce products and fields for intelligent, relevant search powered by its custom search engine.

Navigate to SearchWP > Settings > Engines and click on Sources & Settings:

1. Check both Products and Comments to add these content types to search results
2. Under Products, click on Add/Remove Attributes
3. Add SKU > Select _sku from the dropdown
4. Drag the SKU slider to the right to boost relevance

You have now successfully configured SearchWP to index product SKUs! 🎉

Hit Save Engines and let the plugin rebuild the search index including SKUs.

Step 3 – Preview SKU Search on Your Live Site

You can now test search by SKU directly on your online store after SearchWP indexes all products:

• Navigate to existing search bar/widget
• Input SKU code for any product
• See the matching item appear at the top

For example, searching woo-beanie-logo returns:

Voila! With those 3 simple steps your customers can now use SKU codes to instantly access products.

Consider adding site search best practices like type-ahead suggestions and filters to further optimize lookup. Review our guide to learn more ways to improve search and discovery.

I hope this complete walkthrough helped explain exactly how to enable this highly useful capability – search by SKU – for your WordPress WooCommerce store. Please reach out with any other questions!