Stay Up-to-Date With New Shopify E-Commerce Features

For both shoppers and merchants, an e-commerce store’s functionality can make or break experiences and sales. Most specifically, a store’s search and discovery feature ensures that shopping for needed and suggested products is an easy task for the consumer.

Because of this, e-commerce specialists, like Shopify, have continued to invest in optimizing their storefront search and product recommendations. In Shopify’s recent article titled, “Convert More Shoppers Into Buyers With Shopify’s Enhanced Storefront Search and Product Recommendations,” which was referenced to create this blog article, they mentioned that by “utilizing modern machine-learning models, [they] continue to run experiments to enhance your store’s performance—improving the overall shopping experience for your customers.” 

Below are some of the recent updates Shopify has made over the past few months, which are now available to all Shopify merchants.

Better search relevance

For all those times your customers make a typo, Shopify is now offering search results that are more relevant than ever before. They have built typo tolerance into search so shoppers can find what they need, even when they make a spelling mistake. 

Additionally, the new and improved search results are now based on “buyer intent signals,” such as historical data and clicks, so that shoppers are able to find what they’re looking for faster, helping your business experience more sales and conversions. In fact, “in 2022, Shopify saw merchants who were using Shopify Search increase their search revenue by up to 19% compared to the previous year.” 

*These updates are turned on automatically and no action is needed on your company’s part*

Typeahead search

Now, with typeahead search, Shopify has added an additional list of suggested searches to predictive search that shoppers will see as they type. As a result of this, consumers will ideally see fewer “no results” pages when they search a site. When buyers are lightly guided to search for more specific terms that yield more relevant results, Shopify is able to better match results with their search intent, leading to a smoother, faster shopping experience.

More relevant auto-generated product recommendations

According to Shopify’s research, product detail pages account for up to 50% of customer traffic across stores. Therefore, they can be a powerful entry point for cross-selling products. With Shopify’s better-than-ever product recommendations, Shopify has 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, Shopify saw merchants using Shopify Recommendations increase their recommendations revenue by up to 29% compared to the previous year.

Overall

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

For more search and recommendations performance insights, Shopify suggests using 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, be sure to upgrade your website to an Online Store 2.0–supported theme today.

References

https://www.shopify.com/blog/storefront-search-and-recommendations