Helm › Helm University › Track 3 › Lesson 3.1
Lesson 3.1How buyers actually find you
Six ways in, and one that a lot of sellers assume exists and does not.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Name the six surfaces a product can appear on, and the one place it never appears.
The six surfaces
There are exactly six places a Helm shopper meets a product.
- Browse. The main rail, with sorting and an optional category filter. Twenty four products at a time, up to sixty if the page asks for more.
- Category chips. The 23 fixed categories, each of which can show a live product count.
- The Shop home page. Chips plus a personalised recommended rail. Lesson 3.3 covers it.
- The verified rail. Verified shops only. Lesson 3.2 covers how it is ordered.
- Your storefront. Your own page, at your own address, listing everything you have live, newest first.
- The product page. Where a listing finally shows its description and its variants.
Every one of those applies the same three part visibility test, and all three must pass:
product active + moderation approved + shop active
The place your products never appear
Helm has a Discover section with a search box, a For You feed, suggestions and trending. It is worth being direct about this because it is the most common wrong assumption a new seller brings: Discover does not search products.
Discover searches people and posts. Creators, accounts, and what they post. The code behind it never touches the product table at all. A shopper typing your product name into Discover will not find your product.
Product search lives inside the Shop, on the browse rail, and it is a plain substring match against your title and description. Nothing else searches your catalogue.
What that means for your listings
Because the only text search is a literal substring match with no synonyms, no stemming and no spelling correction, the words in your title and description are the whole of your searchability. If a buyer types a word that is not literally there, you do not come back.
Write the words people actually use, including the ones you personally find inelegant. A listing titled Handcrafted Ceramic Vessel does not match somebody searching for a mug.
Your storefront has no page limit
Worth flagging honestly. Your storefront returns every live listing you have in one response, with no paging. That is fine at thirty products and a problem at three thousand, and it is a known gap rather than a deliberate design.