For shoppers and merchants alike, a store’s search and discovery functionality can make or break the ecommerce experience. Great search makes shopping easy, surfaces the right products, and often leads to higher conversion. In addition, related and complementary products help a buyer discover more of what a store has to offer.

That’s why we continue to invest in optimizing Shopify’s storefront search and product recommendations. Utilizing modern machine-learning models, we continue to run experiments to enhance your store’s performance—improving the overall shopping experience for your customers.

Let’s take a look at some of the updates we’ve made over the past few months, which are now available to all Shopify merchants.

Explore storefront search & recommendations improvements:

Better search relevance
Typeahead search
More relevant auto-generated product recommendations

Better search relevance

For all those times your customers type “tablle” instead of “table,” we’re delivering search results that are more relevant than ever before. We’ve built typo tolerance into search so shoppers can find what they need, even when they make a spelling mistake.

Improved search results are based on buyer intent signals, like historical data and clicks, so shoppers find what they’re looking for faster—helping you see higher sales and conversions. In fact, in 2022, we saw merchants using Shopify Search increase their search revenue by up to 19% compared to the previous year.

How do you turn this capability on? You don’t. There’s no action needed on your part to benefit from these automatic improvements. For greater control, you can use the Search & Discovery app, which lets you choose what products to boost. Those products will appear at the top of the search results page so you can drive traffic to higher-value or under-selling products.

Typeahead search

You may have already added predictive search to your theme. Now, with typeahead search, we’ve added an additional dynamic list of suggested searches to predictive search that shoppers will see as they type.

Since these suggestions can serve as a form of auto-correction, buyers will see fewer “no results” pages when they search. As buyers are guided to search for more specific terms that yield more relevant results, we’re able to better match results with their search intent, leading to a smoother, faster shopping experience.

More relevant auto-generated product recommendations

Product detail pages account for up to 50% of customer traffic across stores, so they can be a powerful entry point for cross-selling products. With Shopify’s better-than-ever AI-powered product recommendations, we’ve improved the models for recommendations to increase cart size and boost sales.

Related product recommendations will automatically be surfaced for any product on your store. No historical purchase data is required, because we leverage neural networks that learn from co-purchase data across all of Shopify, as well as products with similar descriptions.

In 2022, we saw merchants using Shopify Recommendations increase their recommendations revenue by up to 29% compared to the previous year.

For products with historical sales, recommendations will be even more relevant, based on products that are frequently bought together from your store.

For more granular control, you can customize product recommendations in the Search & Discovery app, where you’ll be able to see a preview of the automatically generated recommendations.

Successful search and recommendations at your fingertips

The search bar is often the first stop for visitors to your store, so getting the experience right is critical. By using powerful insights to better predict shoppers’ needs, our latest features are boosting sales—helping shoppers find your products more easily than ever before.

And for more search and recommendations performance insights, you can use analytics in the Search & Discovery app where you’ll see top performing search terms, conversion metrics for product recommendations, and more.

Get improved storefront search capabilities today

To take advantage of Shopify’s full range of native capabilities and features, like improved storefront search and recommendations. Upgrade your website to an Online Store 2.0–supported theme today.

Upgrade to Online Store 2.0

Jessica Dolinski