This is the second article in our series exploring how Searchspring’s Generative Discovery platform works hand-in-hand with Shopify and other ecommerce platforms to deliver cutting-edge product discovery solutions. In our first post, we highlighted how Searchspring’s AI-driven search and filtering capabilities enhance Shopify’s native features, eliminating dead-ends like zero results pages, and driving higher conversions by aligning more closely with shopper intent.

In this installment, we dive deeper into the personalization engine that powers our enhanced search and other key offerings. This technology is at the heart of Generative Discovery, a dynamic shopping experience that learns, adapts, and personalizes each interaction to reduce search abandonment and increase store conversions.

Searchspring and Shopify aren’t competing platforms—they’re a powerful combination. Shopify provides a strong backbone for managing your ecommerce store, while Searchspring layers on advanced search, recommendations, merchandising, bundling, and data management. Together, we enable merchants to elevate their product discovery and deliver exceptional, tailored experiences for both customers and businesses.

How Searchspring Personalization powers Generative Discovery

Searchspring Personalization enables personalized search and merchandising, targeted recommendations, and predictive bundling across key ecommerce pages, and even on external channels, such as email, SMS, and social media.

Searchspring Personalization software uses machine learning and AI to match real-time customer data and behaviors against product data and synonyms to make Generative Discovery a reality.

Just as search engines organize the world’s information and social networks connect people, Generative Discovery understands customer intent – predicting exactly what shoppers want and delivering it instantly.

Searchspring’s Generative Discovery: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Personalization

At the heart of Generative Discovery is search accuracy.  Going beyond simple keyword matching, Searchspring uses advanced machine learning to interpret historical and real-time customer data—like browsing behavior, purchase history, and real-time searching and browsing—to understand the actual intent behind each search query. By analyzing intent against an e-commerce site’s full product catalog, and associated generative synonyms, Searchspring’s Generative Discovery engine displays search results that are highly personalized and 100% relevant.

Intent-Based Merchandising: A New Way to Personalize

Generative Discovery doesn’t stop at search. It also powers intent-based merchandising and discovery, by analyzing customer behavior and tailoring product recommendations, merchandising, and promotions across your e-commerce site to match each shopper’s individual profile.

Searchspring incorporates Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically extract keywords from the existing product description field in a customer’s product catalog. The extracted keywords are then used to improve product discovery for shoppers.

This degree of personalization enables merchants to provide a unique shopping experience for each customer, which leads to greater customer satisfaction, higher engagement, and increased conversion rates and AOV.

How Searchspring Personalization enhances Shopify recommendations

Shopify offers its own recommendations solution which provides an excellent foundation for new stores. However, to increase engagement and minimize abandonment they need more advanced tools that optimize the ways customers discover and interact with products.

With Shopify native:

• Recommendations are only available on the Product Details Page; not on Search and Discovery pages which are commonly leveraged by experienced merchants.
• Only related and complementary match rules can be applied, and deployment is usually manual, not dynamic.
• Display units have no fill-in option; so there are blanks when rules criteria are not met.
• Message-based recommendations, like email or SMS, are not available out of the box.
• Searchspring allows advanced merchandisers to offer custom sorts, for example, new arrivals or best sellers.

With Shopify + Searchspring:

• Get maximum conversions from minimum effort, using Searchspring’s always-on, automated personalization and conversion optimization, powered by AI.
• Boost Average Order Value (AOV) effortlessly with Searchspring’s AI-driven recommendation system, which requires minimal intervention after set up.
• Provide customers with precise and relevant product suggestions with real-time updates based on real-time sales data and user behavior.
• Ensure customers find exactly what they’re looking for, thanks to Searchspring’s ability to understand shoppers’ intent using advanced AI and machine learning technology.
• Create shopping experiences that increase loyalty by personalizing recommendations and merchandising.
• Increase engagement and conversions by placing personalized recommendations right across your ecommerce site—on landing pages, carts, or product listing pages—thanks to the flexibility of the Searchspring platform.

How do customers benefit from Searchspring personalization?

Outdoor clothing retailer 2XU uses Searchspring’s intelligent algorithms and AI-learning models to understand and adapt to shopper behaviors, helping to boost conversion by placing the perfect products in front of each shopper.

Working in tandem with Searchspring’s merchandising tools, automated personalization frees up significant time for the 2XU team. As a result, they can focus on other projects that increase sales and enhance business operations. 

According to Chris Ventura, Global Ecommerce Manager at 2XU: “Where we gain the most value from Searchspring is having the merchandising side of things pretty much managed for us. We know that what’s being shown to shoppers is based on pre-configured rules, designed to have the most commercial impact. I can’t emphasize enough the amount of time and effort this saves for our coordinators – and the sales outcomes it helps us create.”

After upgrading from Shopify native to Shopify + Searchspring, 2XU achieved:

The Challenges

Founded in 2005, 2XU (pronounced “two times you”) provides sports-minded consumers with ultimate technical compression and activewear apparel designed to maximize performance and minimize recovery time.

With Shopify alone, the company’s Ecommerce Coordinator had to manually merchandise PDPs and collection pages based on external system analytics. Products were painstakingly prioritized using trend analysis and then replicated to a multitude of collections across the company’s four different domains. 2XU needed a full-time resource to manage this process.

The company wanted a capable website search and merchandising platform with a personalization layer to help merchandisers understand shopper behaviour automatically, to save time and more effectively tell the brand story.

Searchspring and Shopify together, delivering 2X Search revenue

By adding Searchspring to the mix, 2XU’s four global sites are now set up using automated rules and configurations that personalize and pr prioritize products for each shopper within collections. 

Why Searchspring is the essential ingredient in every e-commerce platform

Searchspring’s advanced search capabilities and personalized recommendations make it the most essential ingredient for e-commerce businesses looking to create an intelligent and scalable product discovery solution. While Shopify is an excellent starting point, it cannot match the efficiency, accuracy, and performance of Searchspring’s AI-driven tools when it comes to personalization, search, recommendations, merchandising and bundling. For merchants looking to drive deeper engagement, increase conversion rates, boost AOV and rapidly scale their operations, Searchspring is the essential addition to your core ecommerce platform.

Also in this series:

How Searchspring enhances Shopify search (Part 1)

Searchspring’s enhanced search leverages personalization to understand buying intent and precisely matches it against the full product catalog, including AI-generated synonyms, to predict exactly what shoppers want and deliver it instantly.

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.