Table of Contents

• What does a Shopify AI Search Consultant do?
• Why Is Better Search Important For Your Shopify Store?
• Game 1: How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
• 5 Ways Shopify AI Search Experts Can Benefit Your Store
• 1. Understand How Buyers Search
• Game 2: Same Item versus Different Item
• 2. Manage Spelling Errors
• 3. Enhance Product Ranking
• 4. Generate Useful Filters
• 5. Linking Search to Product Discovery
• Where Does ExpertRec Fit?
• Ways to Improve Shopify AI Search Using ExpertRec
• 5 Indicators That Your Shopify Store Could Use Some Improved AI Search
• Shopify’s Search: A Comprehensive Overview.
• Final Thoughts

Think of a customer visiting your Shopify site who is seeking a steel water bottle priced under ₹1,500 for office use.

They enter the search term: “office water bottle price under 1500,” but the results show a sports water bottle, a ₹2,500 flask, and some unconnected items.

Your business has the preferred product on its site, but what has gone wrong? The customer was looking for something specific; however, your search engine could not understand the request.

This is where a Shopify AI search consultant comes in. Instead of treating search merely as a means for customers to type in their keywords, an AI search consultant examines the customers’ searching habits, the expectations they have when searching, and the issues they encounter before ending up in your store.

This can provide huge benefits to a growing eCommerce company.

What does a Shopify AI Search Consultant do?

A Shopify AI search consultant helps businesses create a seamless shopping experience by enhancing product discovery and search using the latest AI technologies.

In a way, this role can be viewed as three different roles combined – a Shopify expert, a search expert, and a customer behavior analyst.

It’s more than just installing a search application, though.

The aim is to answer questions like the following:

• What products are customers looking for?
• Are they able to find the products they need?
• What happens in cases when they make spelling mistakes?
• Are the customers using other words to search as compared to the words in the product names?
• What searches give zero results?
• What products have to be shown first in the search?
• Are visitors performing a purchase after searching for something?

For instance, your product could be labeled as:

“Electric Kettle of Stainless Steel – 1.5L.”

On the other hand, customers may search:

“boiling kettle”
or
“kettle for tea”
or
“kettle of capacity 1.5 liters”

Hence, an ideal search solution should cover these multiple ways of speaking the same thing.

Shopify already offers intelligent searching features nowadays, including semantic searching ability, predictive searches, and typo tolerance, as well as Search & Discovery tools which allow sellers to tailor-make filters, synonyms, search results, and recommendations.

However, as your catalog expands, you may want to gain greater control over search analytics and understanding your products.

At the same time, that is when an expert solution like ExpertRec comes in useful.

Why Is Better Search Important For Your Shopify Store?

Imagine your Shopify store has 5,000 products. Would you expect somebody to browse through all the products? The answer is no. That’s why there is a search. But that search only works when it actually allows your customers to find what they are looking for. If there are issues with searching on your site, it can lead to:

• Relevant products
• Product searches resulting in zero results
• Misspellings
• Hard to find products
• Too many relevant search results
• Products becoming hard to find
• Loss of revenue

When someone is searching on your site, it means: “I know what I want, so get me there.”

5 Ways Shopify AI Search Experts Can Benefit Your Store

1. Understand How Buyers Search

Buyers don’t need to use the same terminology as found in catalogs.

A grocery store could have goods such as:

• Backed Makhana Nuts
• Whole Grain Crackers
• Granola Bars made with almonds
• Oat Cookies

But customers search for items using different terms like:

• “health snacks”
• “snacks to be taken to the office”
• “snacks with little sugar”
• “snacks for kids”

This means people search for things according to their needs and not according to what they are called in the catalog.

A Shopify AI Search expert analyzes these inquiries and provides customers with the proper answers.

2. Manage Spelling Errors

Let’s be honest.

Spelling errors happen.

Somebody may search for:

“stainles steel bottle”

Another one can type:

“iphne charger”

What they don’t want to see is the “no results found” page.

They want a product.

With AI-driven search having typo tolerance, common misspellings and errors can be recognized and relevant products displayed.

But it should not end at spelling correction.

A solid Shopify AI search scheme must also inquire:

• Did the customer click?
• Did they add the product to the basket?
• Did they place an order?

Here lies the usefulness of search analytics.

AI-powered search for Shopify stores

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ExpertRec helps Shopify stores deliver intelligent search experiences with AI-powered search, autocomplete, typo tolerance, synonyms, relevant product results, and powerful search analytics.

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AI-powered search • Smarter discovery • Better product relevance

3. Enhance Product Ranking

If a buyer enters this search phrase:

“running shoes priced below ₹4,000”

then your website hosts 100 products.

Which product should be chosen first?

All sync products may not be equally useful.

The search ranking can include such criteria:

• Relevance
• Popularity
• Availability
• Customer behaviour
• Promotions
• Business priorities

Shopify Search & Discovery provides tools that help to customize and improve search results.

In case of larger catalogues, AI-based search solutions can help in enhancing relevancy and reducing the amount of manual work needed for managing searches.

4. Generate Useful Filters

Think about looking for a laptop and getting 700 results.

That information may not be of use.

Customers need to have the opportunity to specify their search.

For laptops, meaningful filters are as follows:

• price
• RAM
• storage
• brand
• CPU
• display size

In case of office chairs:

• price
• material
• height adjustment
• type of back
• weight limit

Appropriate filters save time for customers, allowing them to achieve the desired results faster.

5. Linking Search to Product Discovery.

Search can lead to more than a single product being discovered.

Take, for example, a customer searching for “coffee maker”, who eventually finds the desired coffee maker.

However, they may also have other needs.

They may be looking for:

• Coffee beans
• Filters
• Measuring spoons
• Cleaning tools

Alternatively, a customer searches for “Bluetooth speaker”. That person now requires:

• Cases for Bluetooth speakers
• Charging cable for Bluetooth speaker
• Power adapter for Bluetooth speaker

This is where product discovery and search come together.

In this context, platforms such as Shopify’s Search & Discovery and ExpertRec help provide the best search and discovery experience.

Where Does ExpertRec Fit?

This is where ExpertRec comes into play for Shopify sellers, through its advanced capabilities on website search, which means that the search is made quicker, smarter, and more relevant.

ExpertRec offers AI-based search, semantic search, autocomplete, typo-fixing, synonyms, custom and flexible search, and analytics.

Let’s take the example of the search query:

“earbuds for calls below ₹2,000”

This is not just a search keyword; there are several data points included.

Category: Earbuds
Use case: Calls
Budget: ₹2,000
Purpose: Buying

A modern-day search experience should ideally leverage such inputs to have relevant search results.

Having ExpertRec can make the process of product discovery easier for stores with big catalogs, a variety of products, or customers frequently resorting to natural-language searches.

Ways to Improve Shopify AI Search Using ExpertRec

A working search plan must not start with: “Let us get started with a new search app.” Instead, it has to start with: “Let us find out where our current search failure lies.”

Step 1: Evaluate your current search

Look at:

• The effective searches
• The searches that don’t yield results
• The searches where customers leave without clicking on any product
• The successful product clicks
• The conversions generated through the search.

Step 2: Check your product information

Look at:

• Your product titles
• Your product descriptions
• Your product categories
• Your product attributes
• Your product tags
• Your product variants
• Your product collections.

Step 3: Experiment with actual customer queries

Look at not just the perfect searches; use some less perfect, too. For instance: “water bottle”, “office flask,” “bottle below 1000”, “1 litre bottle with cold water,” and “insulated bottle.”

Step 4: Measure the results

Take note of:

• How often customers search for products
• Click-through rates
• Zero-result rates
• Add-to-cart rates
• Conversion rates and
• The searches that customers undertake.

5 Indicators That Your Shopify Store Could Use Some Improved AI Search

You should take a closer look at your search experience if:

1. Your product catalog is expanding rapidly.

With the increase in products, managing search becomes difficult.

2. Customers are often using your search box.

Search quality can greatly impact the success of product discovery.

3. Your business has many zero-result searches.

This means customers are unable to find what they are looking for.

4. Customers are using natural-language queries.

An instance of this can be:

“Gift for a 10-year-old for less than ₹1,500,”

is much more detailed than:

“Gift.”

5. The search visitors are not converting.

If the customers search, go through the products, and then leave, there is something wrong with your search experience.

Shopify’s Search: A Comprehensive Overview.

Shopify provides effective tools for search and discovery functionalities. The main question here is not whether Shopify employs AI search.

The right question is whether your current search capabilities offer a satisfying experience for customers, as good customer experience is defined by the ability to search for the desired products without encountering useless search results, searches with no results, or issues with product filtering.

In this case, it makes sense to turn to a Shopify AI search consultant to find out whether the built-in functionality offered by Shopify is sufficient or whether more advanced technology such as ExpertRec can be applied.

Final Thoughts

You can possess some amazing products, great prices, and even fantastic marketing for your Shopify store.

However, customers may not find those great products you have and hence miss out on potential sales.

AI-powered search is intended not just to improve the appearance of your search bar and make it more cutting-edge.

It is intended to create an easier shopping experience.

The right AI search strategy for Shopify ensures that a customer can:

Search as naturally as possible → Find the right products → Limit their search → Find alternative products → Make their purchase fast and effortlessly.

And this is what ExpertRec will gladly do for Shopify users to make their product searches faster and smarter.

The best search engine isn’t necessarily the one that sounds the most sophisticated.

The best search engine is the one that helps a customer search with minimal effort.

Are you ready to make searches in your Shopify store even better?

Test and implement ExpertRec for an intelligent AI search.

AI-powered site search for Shopify

Turn Shopify Searches Into Better Product Discovery

ExpertRec helps Shopify stores deliver faster, smarter, and more relevant search experiences with AI-powered search, autocomplete, typo tolerance, synonyms, and intelligent product discovery.

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AI-powered search • Smarter discovery • Better product relevance