Optimize Your Shopify Experience

What exactly can an optimized Shopify search bar do for the success of a new shop or business?

23:20 10 June 2022

More and more people are realizing how easy it is to start an online storefront by using Shopify, meaning that more people are likely to shop on these new shop pages. However, new shop owners might have a difficult time making their Shopify search results pop up in the way that they want to, underpopulating results pages and confusing new customers.

 

It’s actually possible to improve the way that your customer’s Shopify search results are displayed to them on your own storefront. Unfortunately, many of these methods require some knowledge of coding in order to address the issues that you’re having. But there are also third party applications and services that are able to fix up your Shopify search results pages for you.

 

So, how useful is it for a Shopify storeowner to update the search function on their shop? And what exactly can an optimized Shopify search bar do for the success of a new shop or business?

 

Allow Customers to Search with Keywords for Particular Types

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can let your customers shop with filters according to different shop categories you might have, at least not if you’re coding on Shopify on your own. Rather, this would allow your Shopify search bar users to filter out items based on whether they are products, articles or pages.

 

This is useful in some cases, especially if you are writing content for your Shopify store that relates to the products that you’re also selling. But it can also be seen as a little bit limiting, especially if you’ve seen the good things that search bars can do on other websites.

 

Again, there are third party companies that will make it so you can change how your Shopify search bar functions even if you don’t know how to code or simply don’t want to.

 

Showing Items Based off of Availability

In some cases, your inventory for a particular item is simply going to run out. In the long-run of your shop, this is going to be pretty difficult to avoid 100% of the time, as much as something like that may bother you.

 

However, it’s possible to make it so a search query only shows results that are currently available through your website. If you’ve run out of customizable t-shirts in one color, for example, you can still show that you’re able t customize t-shirts in some other colors for your customers.

 

This is great for reducing frustration, as customers can easily get interested in some of the items that they see and then get frustrated if they’re told that they can’t have it. Allowing customers to sort items based on availability can also be helpful because they could be pointed into another direction that suits their needs, even if it wasn’t exactly what they originally had in mind.

 

Sorting Based on Item Popularity

Sorting based on the popularity of something on your shop is not one of the default options that you might be able to access if you’re coding your own search bar in Shopify, at least this one isn’t typical. However, third party applications will give you and your potential customers the option of whether or not they want to sort your shop’s inventory by popularity.

 

This should, assumedly, also be possible for articles and website pages, but is most conceivably and immediately useful to those who are selling products through Shopify.

 

In terms of why you might want to do this, it allows both you and your customers to see which items, depending on the customer’s search queries, are the most popular in a given category or niche you might be offering.

 

This can help inform your customer’s decisions, helping them make a decision a little bit faster based on other people’s opinions or choices. And this can also be helpful for shop owners because sorting by popularity can help give a better idea of which items are most likely to need another restock, when, and how much.

 

Helping Customers Sort by Price

Have you ever been on a website where you weren’t able to sort out different products based off of how expensive they might be? It can be a bit of a nightmare, especially if you know that you’re on a budget and can only spend so much before your next paycheck or bill comes in.

 

Third party companies and applications can also help you with optimizing your Shopify search results in this way, allowing customers to sort based on prices from high to low or low to high.

 

Not only will this sort of functionality help your customers figure out what sort of price range is going to be normal on your Shopify store, it’ll also make it much more likely that they’ll make a purchase while visiting your website.

 

This particular functionality can easily help potential customers figure out what they should expect to spend, stick within their budget, and even make them more likely to make a purchase because of the lowered confusion and frustration in particular.

 

Additionally, if someone is sorting by price, this is a strong indication that they are looking through your shop with their budget in mind. That means they’re strongly considering making a purchase and are not simply interested in aimlessly scrolling through your store while they’re visiting. Talk about making your business easier to organize!