Can your customers quickly find the product they're looking for on your Shopify store?
Even with a rich product lineup, if customers can't reach what they want, you may be missing out on sales opportunities. On-site search functionality is what solves this kind of problem.
This article explains, in an easy-to-understand way, the benefits of on-site search on a Shopify store, the features you can implement, and how to customize the search function.
If you want to strengthen your store's search functionality, please use it as a reference.
Does Shopify Need On-Site Search? Use Cases and 3 Benefits
When running a Shopify store, on-site search functionality is an indispensable tool for customer satisfaction and boosting sales. Here are use cases for on-site search and 3 of its benefits.
Use Cases for On-Site Search
The purpose of on-site search is to let customers find the product they're looking for within your store quickly and easily.
Specifically, it's used in scenarios such as the following.
- When the customer knows the product name: By directly typing the name of the product they're looking for into the search box, they can quickly reach the product page.
- When searching by product category or characteristics: For example, searching with keywords like "red dress" or "waterproof sneakers" to find the desired product.
- When efficiently narrowing down a large product lineup: Using refine search or filtering features to find products that match specific conditions.
Having this kind of search functionality saves customers the trouble of searching, letting them enjoy shopping without stress.
Benefit 1 of On-Site Search: Improved Customer Experience
A situation where a customer can't easily find the product they're looking for causes stress. In the worst case, they may abandon your store altogether.
Conversely, if you can quickly present accurate search results, customers can smoothly reach the product and proceed to the purchase process. Customers will come away with a positive impression: "this store is easy to use."
In this way, letting customers quickly find the product they want greatly improves the customer experience and boosts customer satisfaction as well.
Benefit 2 of On-Site Search: Maximizing Sales Opportunities
The fact that a customer is "searching for a product on the site" indicates they already have some degree of purchase intent. If you can seize this moment and present the right product, the likelihood of a purchase increases dramatically.
Additionally, by showing related products or recommended products alongside search results, you can also encourage cross-selling and upselling. You can spark needs the customer wasn't even aware of themselves, leading to purchases beyond their original intent.
Benefit 3 of On-Site Search: Understanding Customer Needs
The keywords entered into on-site search are the customer's "voice," and represent extremely valuable data. By analyzing what words are used to search for products and what products are in demand, you can grasp customers' latent needs and trends.
These analysis results can be used across many aspects of store operations — improving your product lineup, optimizing keywords on product pages, and getting hints for new product development. If there's a product that customers search for but can't find, that could represent a new business opportunity.
In this way, by leveraging search data, you can run your store in a way that's more attuned to your customers.
Search Features You Can Implement on Shopify
Shopify lets you implement a variety of search-related features on your store. This chapter introduces 4 representative search features. By implementing features suited to your store, you can expect to improve customer satisfaction and boost sales.
Refine Search
Refine search (faceted search) is a feature that lets customers efficiently narrow down the displayed set of products by specifying multiple conditions. For example, you can set various attributes as conditions, such as product category, price range, color, size, and brand.
By selecting conditions that match their needs, customers can quickly reach the group of products they want, even from among a huge selection. This significantly reduces the time and effort spent searching for products, providing a comfortable shopping experience.
This is a particularly effective feature for preventing customer drop-off at stores with a large number of products.
Search Suggestions (Autosuggest)
Search suggestions is a feature that displays highly relevant keyword suggestions or products in real time as a customer starts typing a keyword into the search box.
Search suggestions not only save the customer the trouble of typing out a keyword to the end, but unexpected related keywords can also give them a chance to discover other products. It reduces search errors caused by typos and supports smoother product discovery, contributing to improved usability as well.
Fuzzy Search
Fuzzy search is a feature where, even if the keyword a customer enters has some typos or omissions, or variations in spelling (e.g., "T-shirt" and "Tshirt"), the system tolerates this to some degree and displays products that seem to be an appropriate match in the search results.
Since customers can reach products without needing to enter a perfect keyword, this reduces customer stress and improves the search experience. It's also a feature that benefits both users and the shop, since it minimizes the shop's lost sales opportunities.
Filtering
Filtering is a feature that lets customers sort or further narrow down, by specific criteria, the list of search results already displayed.
For example, you can sort by "lowest price first," "newest first," or "most popular," or narrow down what's displayed by selecting attributes such as a specific color, size, or material.
While refine search sets conditions before running the search, filtering is an operation performed mainly after the search results are displayed. Since customers can optimize the display to match their own priorities, they can efficiently compare and consider products from among a large selection, supporting a more satisfying purchase decision.
How to Customize the Search Function on Shopify
Here are 3 ways to customize the search functionality on your Shopify store.
Method 1. Customize Using Theme Features
Depending on the Shopify theme you're using, there may be settings available for the search function. In this case, you can relatively easily customize things from the theme editor.
For example, with the free "Dawn" theme, if you select "Search" on a page and then select the "Search results" section of the template, options will appear on the right. You can configure things like the number of search results shown, the shape used to display products, enabling/disabling refine search, and enabling/disabling sorting (filtering).
Image source: Shopify (Dawn theme)
However, the range and content you can customize varies greatly by theme, so first check the documentation and settings available for the theme you're using. While this is easy to try, since it depends on the theme's specifications, the customization you want to achieve isn't always possible.
Method 2. Customize With Code
If you want more freedom in customization, you can directly edit the theme's code. This lets you extend the search function, finely adjust the layout of the search results page, or display additional specific information.
For example, you could make product tags or review ratings more prominent in the search results, or change the design of the search box to match your store's brand image — you can make all sorts of detailed adjustments.
However, this method requires specialized knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid, Shopify's own template language. Incorrect edits can also cause display issues or broken functionality on your site, so careful work is required. If you're not confident, we recommend asking a specialized production company or developer.
Method 3. Adopt a Search App
The Shopify App Store offers various apps for strengthening and extending your store's search functionality. By adopting these apps, you can implement advanced search features relatively easily, even without programming knowledge.
Specifically, you can add the features introduced in the "Search Features You Can Implement on Shopify" section above, as well as AI-based search personalization and search keyword analysis features.
Many apps offer a free trial period, with paid plans available depending on the features you need. It's important to choose the app that best fits the features your store needs and your budget.
4 Recommended Shopify Apps to Strengthen Search and Filtering
Here are 4 hand-picked Shopify apps that can strengthen your store's search and filtering functionality.
Shopify Search & Discovery
Image source: Shopify Search & Discovery｜Shopify App Store
For stores that want to strengthen their search functionality while keeping costs down as much as possible, the free app officially provided by Shopify, "Search & Discovery," is recommended.
Its search features include refine search, search suggestions, synonym settings, priority display of search results, and typo tolerance. It also supports narrowing down and sorting search results.
It also comes with basic search-data analytics functionality, letting you check things like "frequently searched keywords" and "keywords that were searched but have no matching page." You can also check the click-through and purchase rates for recommended products.
The biggest feature of this app is that all of these features are available entirely free. Details on this app are explained in the article below.
Boost AI Search & Filter
Image source: Boost AI Search & Filter｜Shopify App Store
"Boost AI Search & Filter" is an app that dramatically strengthens your Shopify store's search functionality using cutting-edge AI technology. It's used by over 14,000 companies worldwide, including well-known companies like SONY and GAP.
AI accurately reads a customer's search intent and provides personalized search results and suggestions. It also tolerates user typos. In the search results, in addition to basic filter options, advanced filtering by reviews, tags, metafields, and more is also possible. This lets customers intuitively and quickly discover the product they want, even from among a huge product lineup.
It also comes with detailed search analytics functionality, allowing for data-driven improvements. It's recommended for large stores with a high number of products.
This app has a 14-day free trial. However, note that its interface does not support Japanese.
Searchanise Search & Filter
Image source: Searchanise Search & Filter｜Shopify App Store
"Searchanise Search & Filter" is a search app equipped with a variety of features to improve user experience: high-speed search that displays results instantly, autocomplete that shows suggestions as you type, and voice search that saves the effort of typing. By leveraging these features, customers can smoothly reach the product they're looking for.
Another strength of this app is its advanced filtering capability. Even stores handling a large number of products let customers easily find products that match their needs.
While features are limited, it can be used for free for up to 25 products, making it recommended even for small stores on a tight budget. However, this app's interface also does not support Japanese.
This app has a 14-day free trial.
RuffRuff Product & Blog Tags
As a basic feature of the app, clicking a tag shown in the tag list also lets you filter down to products or blog posts that share the same tag.
Recommended for improving user convenience and for SEO through internal linking.
Strengthen Your On-Site Search Function to Improve User Convenience!
This article explained Shopify's search functionality — its benefits, representative features, and how to customize it.
In an online shop with no store staff, search functionality that makes products easy to find is an essential feature. Implementing features like refine search and search suggestions can dramatically improve your customers' purchasing experience. As a result, it can also lead to increased sales for your store.
Using this article as a reference, we encourage you to work on strengthening your search functionality.
