Searchspring + E-commerce Platforms: How Searchspring enhances Shopify with AI-powered search

For e-commerce businesses, offering a smooth, personalized shopping experience is key to driving engagement and sales. Platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Shopware and others provide an excellent foundation for building online stores, with a wide range of features that make setting up and managing an e-commerce business straightforward. However, as businesses grow, they often need more advanced tools that optimize the ways customers discover and interact with products. This is where Searchspring comes in, adding powerful, easy-to-use tools that enhance the e-commerce platform’s native features.

Searchspring and all e-commerce platforms are complementary solutions. The e-commerce platforms give you a robust platform to manage your store, while Searchspring adds sophisticated search, recommendations, merchandising, bundling and data management tools that will take your business to the next level. Together, we form a partnership that helps merchants provide the best possible shopping experience for customers.

These e-commerce platforms serve customers across a wide range of sectors and industries. While their feature sets are solid for basic platform capabilities, they’re limited in what they can provide beyond that to meet modern online shopping demands. This is the first in a series of articles exploring how Searchspring enhances these platforms to deliver a cutting-edge product discovery solution.

Shopify + Searchspring: A Powerful Partnership for Enhanced E-commerce

How Searchspring Enhances Shopify’s Search Capabilities

1. More Intelligent and Customized Search

Shopify has recently improved its search functionality, introducing semantic search in an attempt to understand the intent behind customer queries. This is a step forward, but Shopify’s native search is limited in how it handles synonyms and personalization, which can make it harder for customers to find what they’re looking for, and for complex product catalogs there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

When you integrate Searchspring, you add an extra layer of intelligence to the search experience. Searchspring’s core platform includes a more powerful semantic search, which uses natural language search tools to create the onsite equivalent of a savvy shop assistant. When a user searches for a product, it quickly identifies the words that describe the product type, and the words that relate to key features or attributes. The result is a curated group of products that match the search term perfectly, making it more likely that the shopper will buy.

2. The essential features that Searchspring adds to native search

Searchspring’s IntelliSuggest enhances search results by putting the most searched for of these products at the top of the results page. It works by gathering engagement data from previous search queries and promoting the most clicked on and purchased products for any given query. The most popular 250 queries even have their own curated set of products.

Autocomplete adds to the convenience and speed of the user’s search by generating suggestions as soon as the user starts typing. It accesses previous searches and engagement data to predict queries and deliver the best matches, usually before the shopper has even finished typing.

Integrated Spell Correction helps eliminate “no results” pages (which are often due to insufficient match data or even simple typos). This ensures a smoother, more refined shopping experience.

Searchspring’s Expert tier also incorporates natural language processing (NLP), an AI-powered search methodology that uses a trained AI large language model (LLM) to identify and extract keywords across the entire catalog to interpret customer searches more accurately.

3. What results can you expect by upgrading to + Searchspring?

According to Searchspring customer Alicia Davis, Digital Project Specialist at Incu:

“… the power of Searchspring is its ability to read between the lines, understand our shoppers’ intent, and use smart logic to help customers discover products they’ll love. The platform also helps us make informed decisions, removing the guesswork from what we think shoppers want and showing us what they really love.”

After Incu upgraded its native Shopify platform by incorporating Searchspring, revenue from shoppers using search increased by 15%, the conversion rate from search orders tripled and revenue per visit from search increased to 6.1x.

+Searchspring: Incu added Searchspring to its native e-commerce platform to elevate search

Founded in 2002 by twin brothers Brian and Vincent Wu, Incu is a fashion retailer that introduces shoppers to new brands through carefully curated collections. The business boasts thirteen retail locations (including Rag & Bone and APC stores, and works with over 200 of the world’s most innovative and established designers. Incu wanted to reflect those brands, and its personalised in-store customer service, on its online platform. However, the most common customer feedback about its online store was that finding the right products was “challenging”. As Alicia Davis, Digital Project Specialist at Incu, explained, “If you have a large catalogue of products or many different brands, you need your site search to work flawlessly. Shoppers can be quite brand-term driven. The last thing you want is to miss opportunities because your site is returning zero results for specific and branded queries.”

Describing Searchspring’s solution, Alicia commented, “Most of our traffic is driven by category or brand queries, so slight spelling errors were leaving shoppers at zero-results dead ends. Searchspring helped us minimise those zero search results, and monitor trends, and do clever things like using synonyms and personalised recommendations to keep the discovery journey going. These technologies show shoppers more of what they want, and we’ve seen rapid uplifts in conversion and cart size as a result.”

Incu’s performance after upgrading from native to Shopify + Searchspring:

+15% Revenue From Shoppers Using Search
3.1x Conversion Rate From Search Orders
6.1x More Revenue Per Visit From Search

How Searchspring helps Shopify merchants overcome key limitations in Search:

Searchspring delivers personalized search results based on customer behaviors.
Searchspring uses artificial intelligence so search results improve over time.
Searchspring understands what influences results, and makes it easy to fine-tune them.
Searchspring handles synonyms and product typing.
Searchspring enables you to selectively sort results e.g. by new arrivals or best-sellers.

Key takeaways:

Shopify’s search is improved but still limited, which may lead to customers missing relevant products and potentially losing sales.
Searchspring integration enhances search intelligence, helping customers find products faster, and increasing satisfaction and conversions.
IntelliSuggest prioritizes top products based on user behavior, driving higher sales by promoting popular items.
Autocomplete streamlines the search process, providing faster, more accurate results and reducing friction in the shopping experience.
Spell correction minimizes “no results” pages, keeping customers engaged and reducing site abandonment.
AI-powered NLP improves search accuracy, especially in complex catalogs, leading to more relevant product discovery and higher conversion rates.

Coming up next in this series:

AI-powered Product Recommendations:
Searchspring automates the entire recommendations process, using AI to adapt to catalog changes, and market trends, without any intervention by the merchant. Searchspring’s AI-driven recommendation system continuously updates recommendations based on real-time sales data and user behavior.
ML-powered Merchandising:
Searchspring offers sophisticated merchandising tools that control every aspect of product display. Merchants can schedule when certain products appear, automatically show products that are most relevant based on customer behavior and run A/B tests to optimize product placement.
Personalized Predictive Bundling:
Merchants can curate bundles themselves or use Data Science Intelligence to curate complementary products based on past purchases and shopper activity.

Why Searchspring is the essential ingredient in the Shopify platform

Generative discovery delivers advanced search capabilities and personalized recommendations for eCommerce businesses looking to create an intelligent and scalable product discovery solution. While Shopify is an excellent starting point, the efficiency, accuracy, and performance of Searchspring’s AI-driven tools greatly enhance search, recommendations, merchandising, personalization and bundling for ecommerce businesses. For merchants looking to drive deeper engagement, increase conversion rates, boost AOV and rapidly scale their operations, Searchspring is an essential addition to your core platform.

About Searchspring

Searchspring is a leading global provider of AI-driven product discovery and personalization solutions for e-commerce. Searchspring’s platform integrates real-time customer and product data, making it easy for businesses to understand customer preferences and enhance product visibility on their e-commerce websites and over 1,500 other channels. With more than 15 years of innovation, Searchspring offers customers fast, scalable, and user-friendly solutions. The company holds multiple patents and serves over 2,000 brands, including Chubbies, Arhaus, Mattel, Moen, Fabletics, Peet’s Coffee, SKIMS, and West Elm, supporting its customers from offices in San Antonio, London, Sydney, Denver, Toronto and Portland.