Shopify Search & Discovery App
Shopify merchants pour their heart and souls into their work. So they expect the tools they use to perform at the same level. But our storefront search experience wasn’t living up to that standard; customers were struggling to find what they were looking for and – even worse – we were getting in the way.
And this isn’t about improving search algorithms. It’s about bridging the gap between the world of search technology and the needs of entrepreneurs. These merchants aren’t search experts; they just need a tool that is intuitive and empowers them to reach their customers.
Merchants run their store through Shopify’s Admin, the tool for configuring everything from products to taxes to inventory to sales. The Shopify Search & Discovery app is the first-party search app for the Admin. These are a few ways I improved it to help merchants.
Fragmentation and Confusion
When I first started, the app felt fragmented. Each section seemed like it belonged to a different app, lacking a cohesive experience. This meant merchants were navigating a confusing landscape, making it even harder for them to optimize their search and discovery. We needed to bring clarity and consistency to the experience, translating the intricacies of search into something they could understand and utilize effectively.
I worked closely with junior designers, fostering a culture of constructive critique and design reviews. We leaned heavily on our design system team, ensuring we were using the right patterns and components to create a unified and intuitive experience. This was about building trust and familiarity for our users.
Content design and hard-working UI text is a massive consideration for the Admin
One of the biggest hurdles we faced was the lack of dedicated content design support. Ensuring clarity and consistency in our messaging was crucial, so we had to get creative. Using LLMs, I crafted custom prompts based on our content style guide. This allowed us to systematically check our mocks for errors and optimize our language, ensuring we were communicating effectively with our users, even without a dedicated content designer.
Automatic recommendations
A specific feature I'm particularly proud of is the ability for merchants to add related and complementary products to their product detail pages. 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.
Recommendations can quickly go from complex to complicated
However, it came with its own set of challenges. We needed to differentiate between merchant-specified recommendations and automatically generated suggestions. Automatic suggestions are dynamic and could change at any time – this concept didn’t have much precedence in the Shopify Admin. Our solution incorporated visual design language used in other AI features and progressive disclosure to keep merchants on track.
Merchants using Shopify recommendations increase their recommendations revenue by up to 29% compared to the previous year.
Semantic search improves relevance and accuracy
Search users will only provide a handful of words in the search field, so we have to fill in some big gaps in order to return the right products. Semantic search does this by associating the words in the query with related words and concepts found in the product catalog. It’s a big improvement of keyword-based searches where users have to guess the right word that will yield relevant results.
Animation from the Shopify Editions marketing site
Semantic search means customers can use more natural words and phrases, and get richer, more relevant results. To enable it in their stores, merchants can flip a setting in the Search & Discovery app. (Update: it’s now on by default.) To fine-tune the understanding that happens automatically, we provide an easy way for merchants to add their own synonyms.
Synonym creation in the Shopify Admin
Empowering Small Businesses
Shopify's mission is to empower entrepreneurs, and I felt a deep sense of purpose in contributing to that mission. Seeing merchants connect with their customers and grow their businesses is always fulfilling.
And the impact was measurable. As one of Shopify's 33 first-party apps, our performance is closely monitored. The Search & Discovery app achieved a rating of 4.6, ninth overall. With Shopify's vast merchant base of 1.75 million, our app's widespread adoption means we're making a real difference in the success of countless small businesses.
I think it's a really great website feature. I have a university boutique that basically sells one color of item that comes in many shades so I think it's useful to recommend things that will match or coordinate with other pieces.
— Review from Old Main Emporium
There is no reason why this app should get anything less than 5 stars in 2024. This app gives you complete control over how you cross sell products and seems to have the ability to learn over time what would be best options to cross sell with other products. Also it's completely free and works really well to tap into SEO markets with google giving you the most chances to have your item shown to prospective buyers.
— Review from Trade Sports