Chapter 1: Introduction: Why search & discovery matter

Public AI is all the rage right now. But even when a shopper uses a technology like ChatGPT to find your website, shoppers still need to be able to find what they need on your “private” digital properties like your website – and they need to be able to find it fast.

According to Forrester research, up to 43% of site visitors immediately go to search boxes.

Today’s shoppers expect precision, personalization, and speed. No enterprise can expect to succeed without the best possible search, discovery, and retrieval to match – even exceed – customer expectations.

Search is your foundation. The best, most modern search experiences are seamless and personalized to each site visitor. They allow them to find the right product or content at the right time via search that knows what the shopper wants and conversations with them – not just keywords.

87% of consumers start their product searches online. But only 1 in 10 consumers say they find exactly what they’re looking for when they use search on a retailer’s site.

Effective search encourages and retains loyalty. The best search, discovery, and retrieval offers a sophisticated understanding of each user’s needs. If someone wants to snag a little black dress for Friday night and the interaction is seamless, they’ll come back again – and again.

Discovery and retrieval enhance the power of search. It’s the capacity to inspire customers with rich, federated content, including conversational shopping driven by AI agents.

What’s more: 59% of customers leave a brand after a few bad experiences.

Algolia is committed to intelligent, savvy search allowing you to strategically personalize the front page of any collection to every user in real time, providing additional avenues of discovery and tailored recommendations. Algolia is a sharp, fast, and intuitive search.

Chapter 2: Algolia + Shopify: Deeper relevance at every step

Shopify + Algolia = the best ecommerce with:

AI-powered relevance that drives conversion uplift

Shopify + Algolia drive conversion uplift at every stage of the buyer funnel by empowering merchandisers with the controls and AI capabilities they crave to drive business outcomes: Semantic Search, Real-Time Personalization, Popularity-Based Dynamic Re-ranking, and Merchandising Studio with Smart Collections.

Algolia AI Search offers personalization and relevance at every step of the shopping journey, driving revenue growth. This includes the following examples.

Federated search

The synergizing of data creates immersive experiences for customers and allows Algolia to surface results from multiple sources, external and internal, agnostic of the medium. Searching for fall sweaters can show blogs on fall styling tips too – showing the customer that they’re fully understood.

Semantic search

Show users what they’re looking for the first time with AI-driven results that understand them and know what they need.

AI-Powered relevance

Typo tolerance, synonyms, filters, and custom ranking still allow site visitors to get accurate results in a flash with one query and the power of AI.

Real-time Personalization

Show the user what they need with dynamic, data-driven experiences that adapt in near real-time across every touchpoint and for every user.

Merchandising Studio with Collections

Algolia’s Merchandising Studio comes with Collections to allow merchandisers to have more control, flexibility, and speed. AI-generated Collections, filters, rules, group-based curation, and A/B testing helps merchandising teams create more relevant shopping experiences without any extra engineering overhead.

Popularity-based Dynamic Re-ranking

Using AI to boost the most performant search results allows your users to find what is most relevant to their needs and allows your business to improve conversions and the customer experience. The result? Lasting loyalty.

All founded on Algolia’s pillars of:

Enterprise-level speed at scale

Algolia offers a global sub-20ms response on 1.5 trillion searches/year compared to 2-300ms for competitors). Even with the largest indices and catalogs, Algolia is able to scale with the business, provide virtually real-time indexing, and power performant search seamlessly with real-time inventory awareness and effective results in milliseconds.

Ease of use

Advanced Personalization leverages user behavior – past reads, likes, watch history – to rank the content that’s most relevant to each visitor.

Algolia AI Search determines underlying intent to instantly give each visitor what they’re looking for.

In a world where 80% of searchers rely on AI summaries, this is exactly what consumers need on every website they interact with.

Algolia and Shopify have been partners for ten years.

As partners, we transform every step of a customer’s journey into an opportunity to personalize, recommend, and drive conversions. This creates the best discovery experiences with unparalleled merchandiser-controlled AI search and discovery, and a roadmap to power the future of your ecommerce.

A level of scale no other partner can provide

Shopify + Algolia scale to the largest retailers while delivering results in milliseconds and supporting high-traffic events.

Flexibility to build complex and innovative use cases

Shopify’s extensible platform combined with Algolia’s flexible integrations, APIs and libraries empower retailers to drive unique conversational shopping experiences.

Customizations enable multiple use cases across B2C & B2B

Together Algolia and Shopify satisfy complex use cases like multiple markets, buy online/pick-up in store, markets, and B2B catalogs.

Both platforms are composable, extensible, and natively integrated.

Chapter 3: A fully integrated customer journey

• Discovery: Typo-tolerant, semantic search (Algolia) – -30% CAC
• Content Browsing: Federated discovery across CMS, PIM (Algolia) – +33% conversion rate
• Cross-sell/Upsell: Algolia Recommend, Shopify checkout integrations – +83% conversion with Algolia + Shopify
• Checkout: Shop Pay for lightning-fast conversion – 4x faster checkout via Shop Pay
• Retention: Personalized, AI-driven suggestions post-purchase – +400% revenue from search

50% higher conversion through Shop Pay

Chapter 4: AI classed above the rest

If you’re thinking about adopting bleeding edge AI, Algolia + Shopify is the fastest and easiest way to do so.

Algolia’s superior AI capabilities let you build discovery experiences that evolve with user behavior. This means you can constantly refine relevance in real-time by incorporating a best-in-class search experience. This includes leveraging natural-language understanding, query categorization, dynamic re-ranking, AI synonyms, personalization, and more.

AI power plus human expertise drives revenue.

Shopify and Algolia are leading the way with cutting-edge, AI agentic experiences. Today, you can create an end-to-end shopping assistant powered by these partners. Our AI suite lets merchandisers make data-driven decisions, including analytics and AB testing to back up business strategies.

Algolia + Shopify provide speed and relevancy for conversational search with fast, relevant brand-controlled agents.

Algolia and Shopify provide flexibility to build and customize end-to-end agent experiences using Algolia AgentStudio, Shopify’s agent platform, or any agent platform with Algolia MCP (federated search retrieval) and Shopify MCP (add to cart, purchase, etc.)

Your enterprise has brand control over site search and agents. This is how it works:

The Algolia AI Search and Discovery app replaces Shopify’s built-in search, giving your business Algolia’s fast and configurable search.

Algolia connects to your Shopify store and indexes your products and collections. Your users can then find results using an Algolia search on every page. For more filtering options, you can add full search results pages.

Algolia Search and Discovery is a Shopify Plus certified app. You can use it with your Shopify Plus or Shopify stores.

Chapter 5: Metrics that matter

Algolia does offer easy integration out of the box, getting your new search and discovery capabilities up and running quickly.

We also know that off-the-shelf doesn’t work for enterprise.

Instead, Algolia offers custom services that will transform your data. That will enrich your data.

Algolia can ingest all your data from Shopify and any other sources. All of it will go into a search engine. Then, Algolia can completely customize the experience you have on top of Shopify, storefront, Hydrogen, agent or any other front end.

This offers unparalleled brand control for exponential revenue growth, unmatched ecommerce scale to power advanced, innovative experiences.

If you're thinking about how to compete in the market, and if you’re building something really complex, ask yourself: Do the platforms I’ve invested in make it easy for me to innovate quickly and lightly without it becoming a high-investment, long-term project?

With Algolia + Shopify:

• AI power drives ROI
• Speed at scale powers trust
• Flexibility drives innovation and differentiation

Chapter 6: Leading brands on Shopify trust Algolia to grow their business

• +61% uplift in conversion rate
• +5% increase in revenue from search

Gymshark

Gymshark is a Shopify customer and the U/K's fastest-growing fashion brand, the effects of its remarkable growth drove it to move from its Magento storefront and adopt headless commerce built on Shopify and incorporating best-in-class components.

It now has 15 stores worldwide and 64 million customers online, and in 2020 broke $500 million in revenues.

“We chose Algolia because its APIs are super-easy to work with and very well documented. Also, our goal is very scalable; Black Friday last year we had 450,000 concurrent users on side during the busiest period. Having somebody that can scale up with us is really, really important. And we like how Algolia innovates. We’re always getting new features.”

Ben Pusey, Former Software Product Owner, Gymshark

• +36% increase in click through rate
• +50% increase in converstion rate

1000+ Shopify brands trust Algolia

Chapter 7: About Algolia

Algolia offers the best in AI-powered search and discovery.

We are a leading-edge, scalable search and discovery solution that’s easy to integrate with your existing tech. We’re API-first, providing the most relevant recommendations across brands, categories, and multiple sources of data.

ICP: enterprise eCommerce brands with large catalogues and high traffic

Industries: fashion and lifestyle, food and beverage, consumer goods, auto and B2B

Algolia delivers rapid implementation, giving you tools to measure the impact of our advanced search solution on your business. Clients benefit from our easy-to-use UI libraries for quick UI customization.

• 1 in 3 searches is powered by Algolia.
• Customers see a 33%+ conversion rate increase with our search and discovery.

For the second consecutive year, Algolia has been named a Leader in the Gartner® 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery.

+382% in ROI and <6-month payback (Forrester)

“What really worked miracles for us was the dynamic re-ranking algorithm - that was a real game changer.”

Diptendu Ray, Principal Product Manager, Staples Canada

 

Chapter 8: About Shopify

Shopify is the largest eCommerce platform and the most scalable checkout on the planet.

Shopify offers commerce that scales, innovates and converts faster and better, for a fraction of the cost. It’s TCO is on average 33% lower than competitors.

Businesses can build and customize their online stores and apps with Shopify, using existing templates and with flexibility for developers.

Shopify supports omnichannel selling including ecommerce, apps, social media, and bricks-and-mortar stores.

Like Algolia, Shopify has been designed to scale as business needs change and grow.

• Shopify offers 50% better conversion than traditional guest checkouts through Shop Pay.
• 1K+ Shopify Plus merchants & 70+ Shopify enterprise merchants choose Algolia for advanced search & discovery.
• 10% of US ecommerce flows through Shopify’s platform.

“After saying enough was enough with OpenSearch, we quickly made the decision to return to Algolia. After a quick contracting process, Rugs.com was able to be up and running in less than a day, go live overnight and were already sending click and conversion events to Algolia.”

Grayson Bagwell, Director of E-Commerce and Business Development, Rugs.com

 

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Ready to start your Algolia + Shopify journey?

Quick start guide

The Algolia AI Search and Discovery app replaces Shopify’s built-in search with Algolia’s fast and configurable search. Shopify.com

Customization Options

Clients can benefit from our easy-to-use UI libraries for quick UI customization. Algolia.com