What is the Shopify Theme Editor?

The Shopify Theme Editor is an intuitive, built-in tool that allows merchants to make real-time design and functionality changes to their store’s theme. It enables store owners to customize their store’s layout, colors, fonts, and other design elements without needing to code. You can think of it like WordPress’s Site Editor, for example. 

This user-friendly editor helps businesses create a cohesive and on-brand shopping experience for their customers. 

Vintage Themes vs. Shopify Online Store 2.0: What Changed?

Shopify has come a long way in enhancing drag-and-drop store customization, and one of the biggest leaps forward was the transition from Vintage Themes to Online Store 2.0 in 2021.

Before this update, customizing a Shopify store required modifying Liquid templates, working with custom code, or using limited theme sections on the homepage. With Online Store 2.0, merchants now have far greater flexibility in designing their storefronts—without needing to touch a single line of code.

Key Differences in Customizability

Theme Editor Upgrades

• Improved UI: The new Theme Editor provides a much smoother experience, with better organization and a preview panel for real-time edits.
• Faster Performance: Online Store 2.0 themes load faster and handle customization more efficiently as compared to older themes.

More Sections Everywhere

• Before (Vintage Themes): Merchants could only add sections (like banners or product lists) to the homepage, while other pages were static and required coding for modifications.

• Now (Online Store 2.0): Sections can be added to any page, such as your Search page or Collection pages, giving merchants full control over their store layout.

Easier App Integration

• Before: Apps would often inject their code into the theme files, making them harder to customize or remove.

• Now: Apps built for Online Store 2.0 integrate seamlessly within the Theme Editor, appearing as configurable App Blocks—just like built-in Shopify sections. These apps can be customized directly inside the Theme Editor with a drag-and-drop interface.

Metafields for enriching product catalog

• Before: Merchants had to rely on third-party apps or custom Liquid code to add extra product information.

• Now: Shopify Metafields allow merchants to add custom data fields—such as size charts, care instructions, or product highlights—without extra apps or coding

Why Upgrade to Online Store 2.0?

If you’re still using a Vintage Theme, switching to Online Store 2.0 will unlock a much more customizable and app-friendly Shopify experience. Not only does it make store design more flexible, but it also ensures that third party apps work seamlessly within the Theme Editor. 

By taking advantage of Online Store 2.0’s improved customizability, Shopify merchants can create more dynamic, conversion-optimized stores all while keeping the editing process simple and intuitive. 

Key Features of the Shopify Theme Editor

Whether you’re using a free Shopify theme or a premium one, the Theme Editor allows you to modify your store’s layout, add dynamic elements, and now, even customize certain third-party apps (like Prefixbox AI Search & Filter) as if they were native Shopify sections.

Drag-and-drop customization

Arguably the greatest feature of Shopify’s Theme Editor is its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This means that store owners can easily rearrange content, add new sections, and remove unwanted elements in real time. Unlike older Shopify versions, which required manual code changes, Online Store 2.0 themes support section-based editing on any page, giving merchants full control over their storefront’s design.

Example: Want to highlight a “Best Sellers” section on your product pages? Just add a Featured Collection block and drag it to the perfect spot.

Live preview on multiple devices

Shopify Theme Editor has a live preview panel, which allows users to see changes in real time before publishing them. This eliminates the guesswork of theme modifications and ensures that every adjustment aligns with the store’s branding and user experience.

Moreover, the editor lets users preview their store not only on desktop, but also on tablet and mobile as well – ensuring the layout and the design works on all platforms and screen sizes.

Merchants can experiment with different banner images, colors, or button placements and see how they look before saving changes. 

App block integration

One of the biggest upgrades in Online Store 2.0 is the ability to integrate third-party apps directly into the Theme Editor. Instead of relying on complicated Liquid code or external app settings, supported apps now appear as App Blocks—making them as easy to customize as any native Shopify section.

This means that third party apps can be configured directly from the Theme Editor.

Think about wanting to add a predictive search bar to your homepage or collection pages. If you’re using Prefixbox AI Search & Filter, just add the Prefixbox App Block, customize its size, colors, and layout, and save the changes, all within the Theme Editor.  

Merchants can:

• Adjust search bar placement within their theme
• Modify filter layouts for better product discovery
• Customize search results to match their branding

Theme settings panel

The Theme Editor also includes global settings, allowing merchants to adjust store-wide elements such as:

• Colors (buttons, background, text)
• Fonts (headings, body text, product descriptions)
• Image settings (logo size, banner styles)

This ensures that every page on your store maintains a consistent brand identity, making the shopping experience more professional and engaging.

Example: Want all your “Add to Cart” buttons to be a specific shade of blue? Simply update the primary button color in the Theme Settings, and it will apply across the entire store.

Summary

The Shopify Theme Editor is a game-changer for store customization, allowing merchants to design their storefronts effortlessly—without touching code. With the introduction of Online Store 2.0, Shopify has made it even easier to customize every page, integrate third-party apps, and create a seamless, branded shopping experience.

Mastering the Shopify Theme Editor—along with powerful app integrations like Prefixbox AI Search & Filter—empowers merchants to create a highly customizable, user-friendly, and conversion-optimized store. Whether you’re upgrading from a Vintage Theme or fine-tuning your Online Store 2.0 setup, these tools help you build a storefront that not only looks great but also drives sales and enhances customer experience.

One of the biggest advantages of this upgrade is the ability to embed and configure third-party apps—like Prefixbox AI Search & Filter—directly within the Theme Editor. This means that merchants installing Prefixbox can customize their search bar, product tiles, and filters with a simple drag-and-drop interface, ensuring that their store’s navigation is as intuitive and efficient as possible.

What is a search bar and how it works

A search bar is the white search box at the top of an online E-commerce store and helps shoppers quickly find the products they are looking for. Instead of browsing through countless categories, customers can simply type a keyword or phrase into the search box and get relevant results (keyword and product suggestions) in milliseconds.

Behind the scenes, the way an E-commerce search bar works is quite complex. It relies on algorithms, indexing, and machine learning to deliver accurate results. When a user starts typing, the system processes their input in real time, compares it to a database of products and categories, and return relevant suggestions in the blink of an eye.

More advanced search solutions incorporate Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand intent, typo tolerance to correct errors, and AI-driven personalization to tailor results based on user behavior. The more intelligent and intuitive the search bar, the easier it is for shoppers to find what they need—leading to higher engagement and increased sales.

When users hit ‘Enter’, or click on the search button at the side of the search bar, they are taken to the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), where they sees a thorough list of relevant products, advanced filters to narrow down results, sorting options and often product recommendations. Learn more about Shopify Search pages in this article.

The Impact of a Search Bar

Search users generate six times more revenue compared to non-search users, according to our data, because they have a high purchase intent.

Additionally, among search users, 60% click on predictive search suggestions, whether they are products or keywords.

Encouraging more shoppers to engage with you search functionality—which always begins with the search bar—is one of the easiest and most effective ways to boost revenue.

If you want to learn more about optimizing your autocomplete, check our separate article on best practices for making predictive autocomplete search experience better.

Shopify’s Predictive Search Bar: an overview

Shopify calls their own smart search bar ‘Predictive Search’ in their Search & Discovery app. Predictive Search provides real-time suggestions as users type, helping them refine their search without navigating away from the current page.

Predictive Search suggests products, collections, pages, and blog posts based on the user’s input. By default, Shopify’s search bar displays up to 10 relevant results, drawing from searchable properties such as product titles, types, variant titles, and vendors.

Customization of these suggestions is possible through the Search & Discovery app.

Limitations of Shopify’s Predictive Search

While functional, Shopify’s Predictive Search some issues:​

• Only English language support: Query suggestions are exclusively available in English, limiting accessibility for non-English speaking users.
• Limited customization: Altering the default behavior, such as changing the number of displayed results or modifying searchable properties, requires advanced theme customization using Shopify’s Predictive Search API.
• Issues with relevance: Large product catalogs lead to slower response times and less accurate results.
• Limited customer support: Shopify’s customer support is often slow to respond, and the answers provided are too generic.

Prefixbox Rich Autocomplete search bar

Prefixbox’s AI Search & Filter app calls its smart search bar solution ‘Rich Autocomplete’, aligning with the search industry’s standard naming. It is designed to accelerate the shopping journey by offering intuitive recommendations and easy paths to purchase as soon as shoppers focus in the search box. It deciphers user intent and immediately offers search query, category, and product suggestions.

When a user clicks into the search bar, a dialog box pops up and automatically populates with the most popular products and keywords (and collections) by default. As shoppers start typing, the results update with each keystroke to show the most relevant matches to the query typed.

Prefixbox’s predictive search bar can be enhanced with customizable product tiles that include pricing, discounts, add-to-cart buttons, and other relevant information to help shoppers jump-start their shopping journey. Some of the design settings can be customized natively inside Shopify’s Theme Editor, just like any other Shopify element. Advanced design customizations may require custom CSS coding.

The layout of the search bar can also be customized, allowing you to set the number of columns, products, and suggestions displayed, as well as customize all labels.

Advanced features of Prefixbox Rich Autocomplete

Prefixbox’s Rich Autocomplete stands out due to its comprehensive set of advanced features:​

• Search Results Preview: As shoppers hover over autocomplete query suggestions on desktop, product suggestions dynamically change to preview search engine results pages (SERP), providing an interactive and seamless experience.

• Language Processing (NLP): Prefixbox’s NLP features understand natural language, ensuring relevant results every time. It supports typo-tolerance, multi-language support, suggestion removal, and manual suggestion blocking, enhancing the overall search experience.

• Merchandizing capabilities: Set up promotions under Merchandizing menu to override product results in autocomplete and showcase the products you want at the top – whether for a sale period or to clear out excess stock.

Wrap-up

A well-optimized search bar is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity for an e-commerce store’s success. According to Prefixbox data, search users generate more than six times the revenue compared to non-search users. Additionally, among those who do use search, 60% click on predictive search suggestions. That means that retailers need to ensure they’re using a solution that consistently returns highly relevant results.

While Shopify’s Predictive Search offers a basic solution, it has notable limitations, including restricted customization, English-only support, and relevance issues for large catalogs.

Prefixbox’s own predictive search solution, Rich Autocomplete, on the other hand, delivers a superior shopping experience with NLP-powered recommendations, real-time search result previews, advanced merchandising controls, and fully customizable layouts. By providing smarter, faster, and more relevant search results, Prefixbox helps online retailers increase search adoption, boost conversion rates, and maximize revenue.

One effective way to achieve sustainable growth is through the strategic use of complementary products and smart curation. By offering products that naturally align with each other and cater to customer needs, Shopify merchants can boost sales, improve the shopping experience, and increase customer loyalty; all key factors when considering how to scale a Shopify store.

Let’s dive into how identifying the right products and curating them thoughtfully can lead to long-term success.

Identifying and Adding Complementary Products

When you are ready to scale your Shopify store, offering complementary products is an excellent strategy. Complementary products are items that pair well together and enhance each other’s value. For example, selling a phone case with a matching charger or offering a skincare set with all the necessary products for a full routine makes shopping easier for customers and increases the chance of additional sales.

To scale a Shopify store successfully, you must first understand your customer base. What do they need alongside your main products? For instance, if you sell yoga mats, consider offering complementary products like yoga blocks, straps, or water bottles. Understanding your customers’ behavior is crucial for selecting the right complementary products that will help you scale a Shopify store.

Using Data to Drive Decisions

Data analytics is a powerful tool when you wish to scale a Shopify store. By analyzing your store’s sales data, you can uncover trends and patterns in customer buying behavior. If you notice that customers often purchase a particular product along with another, it’s a good indication that these items complement each other. This insight allows you to create strategic product bundles, increasing both sales volume and average order value.

If you’re looking for an even smarter approach, consider using the AI-powered Syncee GPT for dropshipping product discovery. This tool helps merchants identify trending and relevant complementary products that align with their brand and customer preferences. With these insights, you can effectively scale a Shopify store by curating a thoughtful and relevant product lineup.

Leveraging Customer Feedback for Product Selection

Another critical aspect of identifying complementary products is actively seeking customer feedback. Understanding what your customers think about your existing products and what they feel is missing can provide valuable insights. By using customer reviews, surveys, and social media interactions, you can discover new complementary products that align with customer needs.

For instance, if customers frequently mention the need for a compatible accessory or express interest in a product bundle, consider adding those to your store. Customer feedback not only helps you refine your product selection but also fosters a sense of community and loyalty by showing that you care about their needs. This approach contributes significantly to scale a Shopify store by creating a customer-centric shopping experience.

Tips for Selecting Products that Enhance the Overall Shopping Experience

Curating the right set of complementary products isn’t just about increasing sales; it’s about creating a positive shopping journey that helps you scale a Shopify store by attracting loyal customers. Here are some tips to help you select products that enhance the overall shopping experience:

1. Brand Consistency: It’s important that complementary products align with your brand’s identity. Whether you sell high-quality luxury products or eco-friendly goods, the items you choose to pair together should reflect the same brand values. This maintains a cohesive shopping experience and strengthens brand loyalty.

2. Avoid Overloading Customers: While offering complementary products is great, avoid overwhelming customers with too many options. Too much choice can lead to decision fatigue, which may cause customers to abandon their carts. Focus on a few well-chosen, high-quality products that are highly relevant to your core offerings.

3. Seasonal Collections: Another effective strategy is to curate seasonal collections of complementary products. For example, offering summer-themed accessories or holiday-specific products can create a sense of urgency and drive seasonal sales. This can encourage customers to make purchases they wouldn’t have otherwise, capitalizing on limited-time offers.

By carefully selecting complementary products, you not only increase average order value but also enhance the overall shopping experience. This approach helps you scale a Shopify store by making it easier for customers to find exactly what they need and encouraging repeat purchases. Platforms like Syncee can help you easily find the perfect complementary products from reliable suppliers, ensuring you’re offering items that align with your store’s goals and values.

Creating a User-Friendly Store Experience

A seamless and intuitive shopping experience is indispensable if you want to scale a Shopify store. Here’s how you can create a user-friendly store that converts visitors into loyal customers:

Effective Product Organization and Navigation

Organizing products logically and clearly makes it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Group complementary products together in a “Related Items” section or create bundled product pages. Use categories like “Best Sellers,” “New Arrivals,” and “Recommended for You” to guide customers through the buying journey. A well-organized store helps you scale a Shopify store by maximizing user engagement and reducing cart abandonment.

Utilizing Smart Search Solutions

Smart search solutions like Prefixbox are essential tools for enhancing a store’s user experience. A search bar that understands natural language and provides highly relevant results based on customer queries can drastically improve the shopping experience. Prefixbox, for example, helps customers find complementary products and related items quickly, making it easier to add more to their cart.

An intelligent search system can also boost your chances of cross-selling by showing products that customers might not have thought of but would likely be interested in. With the right search solution in place, your customers will have a smoother path to purchase, and you’ll increase the probability of additional sales.

Optimizing Mobile User Experience

In 2025, mobile commerce continues to grow, and optimizing the mobile shopping experience is crucial to scale a Shopify store. Ensure your store is fully responsive and loads quickly on mobile devices. Simplify the navigation, minimize pop-ups, and streamline the checkout process to reduce friction for mobile shoppers.

Also, consider using mobile-specific features like swipeable product galleries, click-to-call customer support, and mobile payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. A seamless mobile experience enhances customer satisfaction, reduces bounce rates, and increases conversion rates, contributing significantly to scale a Shopify store.

The Power of Social Proof and Customer Reviews

Social proof plays a crucial role in influencing purchase decisions. Displaying customer reviews, ratings, and user-generated content builds trust and credibility. Implementing review widgets, showcasing testimonials, and encouraging satisfied customers to share their experiences on social media helps establish your brand’s authority.

Positive reviews on complementary products also act as persuasive selling points, convincing new visitors to try out the bundled items. This strategy not only boosts conversion rates but also enhances brand loyalty, ultimately helping you scale a Shopify store effectively.

Social media platforms play a vital role in driving traffic and promoting complementary products. By leveraging platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, Shopify merchants can showcase how products work together, inspire purchase decisions, and create a lifestyle narrative around their brand. User-generated content, influencer collaborations, and strategic hashtags increase product visibility and attract potential customers who resonate with the brand’s identity.

For instance, a fashion store can showcase a complete outfit, including accessories, shoes, and bags, allowing customers to purchase the entire look effortlessly. By integrating social commerce features and engaging storytelling, you can enhance the shopping experience and effectively scale a Shopify store.

Best Practices for Product Recommendations and Upselling

Once a customer adds an item to their cart, this is the perfect time to upsell or cross-sell complementary products. Using personalized product recommendations based on browsing history or previous purchases can help guide customers toward items they might need or want.

For example, if a customer is purchasing a camera, suggest a camera bag, lens filters, or a tripod—products that complement their original selection. Upselling and cross-selling not only increase AOV but also enhance the overall shopping experience by helping customers find items that will improve their use of the original product.

Encouraging Repeat Purchases and Building Customer Loyalty

If you want to scale a Shopify store, it does not just mean increasing your customer base—it also involves ensuring that your existing customers keep coming back. One of the best ways to encourage repeat purchases is through the strategic use of complementary products.

How Complementary Products Increase Repeat Purchases

When customers have a positive experience with your store and find products that work well together, they are more likely to return for more. For example, offering refills, accessories, or new seasonal versions of the products they previously purchased encourages them to come back. Complementary products also help increase the chances of multiple purchases in one shopping session, making it more likely for customers to complete their orders.

Personalized Recommendations

Personalization is key when it comes to encouraging repeat sales. Use customer purchase history to provide personalized product recommendations. A customer who bought a pair of headphones, for instance, might appreciate a recommendation for a carrying case or replacement ear pads. Personalized recommendations show that you understand the customer’s needs, which strengthens the relationship and encourages future sales.

Email Marketing and Retargeting Campaigns

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for driving sales and nurturing customer relationships. Personalized email campaigns highlighting complementary products based on previous purchases can significantly increase repeat sales. For example, if a customer bought a camera, sending an email featuring compatible lenses, tripods, or carrying cases is an effective cross-selling strategy.

Segmentation is key to maximizing email marketing’s impact. Divide your email list based on purchase history, browsing behavior, and customer preferences to deliver targeted recommendations. Including dynamic product recommendations, limited-time offers, and personalized discounts encourages customers to explore new products, boosting average order value and customer lifetime value.

Additionally, abandoned cart emails with strategically suggested complementary products can encourage customers to complete their purchases. Offering a discount on bundled items or showcasing customer reviews for related products helps alleviate purchase hesitation, leading to increased conversions and sustainable store growth.

Loyalty Programs and Subscription Models

Another effective strategy is creating a loyalty program or subscription model for ongoing engagement. Offering customers rewards for repeat purchases or allowing them to subscribe to receive complementary products on a regular basis ensures that they stay engaged with your brand.

Conclusion

To scale a Shopify store in today’s competitive e-commerce landscape requires more than just offering great products—it’s about offering the right products in the right way. By strategically selecting complementary products and curating them thoughtfully, Shopify merchants can boost sales, enhance the shopping experience, and encourage repeat purchases.

Remember, the key to scaling is not just in attracting new customers, but in retaining them and ensuring they return for more. Tools like the AI-powered Syncee GPT for product discovery and Prefixbox’s AI search can make the process of curating and discovering complementary products much easier.

By adopting these strategies, Shopify merchants can set themselves up for sustainable growth, making their stores more customer-centric and profitable in the long run. If you’re looking to scale a Shopify store, start by focusing on the right products, the right experience, and the right customer relationships.

Site Search – A Key Element of the Customer Journey

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Search is one of the most critical elements of the conversion pathway. When properly configured, it can significantly increase sales and conversion rates while reducing dropouts.

Despite this, analytics from Prefixbox reveal that only 10–30% of site visitors use the search function. The following table shows the ratios by industry, highlighting significant variation across different sectors:

The search function in online stores typically consists of the search bar in the site’s header and the corresponding search engine results page (SERP). Results can be refined with filters, and similar functionalities may appear on other pages, such as cart or category pages.

In summary, optimizing your online store’s search function is an obvious step for increasing revenue and improving conversion rates.

AI Search – a proven solution, not just some hype

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies further enhances the added value of site search engines.

You may think, “Oh, another story with the AI bullshit.” However, I will easily prove you wrong. AI Search is not a vague potential theory – these solutions are already implemented on live sites, generating revenue.

How AI Search works

Artificial Intelligence solutions enhance search engines in two main areas currently:

• Automation: AI minimizes the need for manual optimization and setup.
• Understanding User Intent: AI interprets conversational queries like, ‘I’m looking for a gaming laptop that can run GTA6.’

Most AI search solutions combine vector database technologies with large language models (LLMs). This approach significantly improves the relevance of search results compared to traditional keyword-based engines, providing more accurate and meaningful results for the shoppers

How does Vector search work? It converts products into mathematical objects (vectors) and places them in a vector space. Consequently, similar products naturally cluster together. Then, the same transformation is applied to search queries. the results closest to the query vector are displayed.

When combined with traditional keyword-based methods, vector search ensures users always get the best possible results.

Additionally, AI and LLM technologies address other challenges, such as:

• Managing Synonyms: Automatically recognizes different terms for the same product (e.g., “notebook” and “laptop”), eliminating the need for manual rules.
• Enhancing Product Descriptions: Makes them clearer and more informative.
• Chat-Like Search Support: AI-powered agents help users find what they’re looking for faster.

Case Study – 45% Increase in Revenue with AI Search

The success of AI-driven search engines is exemplified by the Prefixbox AI Search Engine, which generated a remarkable 45% increase in revenue for the Bauhaus Czech online store during the testing phase compared to a traditional keyword-based engine. Impressed by these results, the client requested an early activation of the AI Search, which has been operating successfully ever since.

Elevating Search Functionality for Shopify Stores

In mid-2021, Shopify introduced “Online Store 2.0” themes, significantly simplifying the use of third-party apps. Since then, apps can be enabled or disabled with a simple toggle within the theme editor. This eliminates the need for code injections or custom integrations, which previously made installing and removing apps more complicated.

Despite this, many stores still use outdated “vintage” themes. The issue with these themes isn’t just that apps are harder (or impossible) to install on them, but also that they’re no longer available in the official Shopify store. As a result, they don’t receive functional or security updates, making them increasingly risky to use. Transitioning from vintage themes is therefore not only strongly recommended but becoming increasingly urgent.

In the modern Shopify environment, installing third-party apps from the official Shopify App Store has become incredibly easy. These apps are excellent for enhancing store functionality with solutions developed by specialized providers. Furthermore, most apps offer free plans, allowing you to test them completely risk-free before making a long-term commitment.

The best third-party Shopify search apps

Search apps available in the Shopify App Store allow you to optimize the search bar, search results page tiles, and filters. Some applications also manage the tiles and filters on collection pages, further enhancing the overall shopping journey.

Issues with the default Shopify Search & Discovery app

The simplest choice is Shopify’s own Search & Discovery app. It’s intuitive to set up since it looks and works just like any other menu in the admin panel. Another key advantage of the Search and Discovery app is that any changes to the products are reflected instantly in the search app as well, as it pulls data directly from Shopify’s database.

However, its simplicity is also a drawback, as some of its features are quite limited. For example:

• The number of filters is limited: You can create up to 25 filters per store.
• No pagination after applying filters: the filtered results aren’t continuously loaded onto a single page.
• No search within filter values: For instance, if a store sells phone cases and creates a filter based on phone models, it will generate a long, scrollable list—but customers can’t search within it.
• Limited customization options.
• Restricted customer support: The official Shopify support team doesn’t always provide sufficiently helpful solutions.

Specialized third-party apps

This is why external, specialized site search apps come in handy. These solutions offer advanced features, full customization, and dedicated customer support to enhance the search experience.

Previously, Prefixbox focused on custom enterprise solutions for mainly mid- and large-sized businesses. However, a few months ago, Prefixbox made the site search technology available for all Shopify merchants in the App store.

With the Prefixbox AI Search & Filter app, the search bar, the search page and collection pages can all be customized directly within Shopify’s theme editor. Filters (on both the search and collection pages) can also include a mini search bar, allowing customers to search within filter values. Additionally, the system automatically displays only relevant filters based on the search query, eliminating the need for manual setup for each collection.

For more details on additional features, visit our dedicated page.

You can find the full list of available search & filter apps in this Shopify App Store category.

Summary

Optimizing an online store’s site search functionality is crucial for boosting conversions, increasing revenue and minimizing churn. Data shows that shoppers who use search generate over 6 times more revenue than those who don’t.

AI-powered search solutions, such as vector search and large language models, further enhance search performance and the user experience throughout the customer journey. These technologies not only reduce the need for manual configurations, but also make search results better and more relevant.

On Shopify, installing third-party search apps has become easier than ever with app embeds in Online Store 2.0 themes. These specialized apps allow merchants to fine-tune and customize their site search and filters, offering advanced features and dedicated customer support for a superior shopping experience.

Understanding Brand Identity

Before diving into how merchandising can reflect brand identity, it’s important to understand what brand identity really means. At its core, branding is the process of creating a unique identity that communicates who you are, what you stand for, and why customers should choose you over your competitors.

It’s not just about logos or catchy slogans—it’s the entire experience your business delivers.

Brand identity includes the following components:

• Brand Vision: The clear, overarching purpose behind your brand—what you hope to achieve and how you want to impact your customers and the world.
• Brand Culture: This reflects the values and principles that guide your business, which should be felt at every touchpoint with your customers.
• Brand Personality: The emotional traits associated with your brand—whether it’s fun, trustworthy, sophisticated, or adventurous.
• Brand Presentation: This includes everything from your visual design (logos, colors, packaging) to how your store or website looks. It’s how your brand is experienced in the physical or digital world.

At its best, a strong brand identity creates an emotional connection with customers, offering more than just functional benefits. It evokes trust, reliability, and loyalty. Once your brand identity is clearly defined, the next step is ensuring that merchandising supports and amplifies it.

What is Merchandising?

Merchandising is the art of presenting and promoting products to drive customer engagement and sales. It involves the strategic placement, display, and pricing of products to make them appealing and easy to buy.

Effective merchandising is not just about showcasing products; it’s about creating a shopping experience that is consistent with your brand’s identity.

Whether in a physical store or online, merchandising involves multiple elements, such as:

• Product Assortment: The range of products you offer should align with your brand’s values and appeal to your target audience’s needs.
• Visual Displays: This includes the design of store displays, window visuals, or online layouts. The way products are presented should tell your brand story and create a visual experience that draws customers in.
• Signage and Communication: Clear, consistent messaging that reinforces your brand identity through slogans, price tags, or online banners.

Successful merchandising extends beyond simply putting products on a shelf. It is about creating an immersive experience that showcases your brand’s unique characteristics. The goal is to build a connection with your customers that goes beyond the transaction, encouraging loyalty and repeat business.

Aligning Merchandising with Brand Identity

To truly align your merchandising strategy with your brand identity, every element of your merchandising efforts must reflect the core values and personality of your brand. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Know Your Brand’s Essence

Before you can align merchandising with your brand identity, you must have a clear understanding of your brand’s core values, personality, and vision. Ask yourself:

• What emotions do we want customers to associate with our brand?
• How do we want to present our brand to the world?
• What story does our brand tell, and how can merchandising bring this story to life?

Your brand’s essence should inform every decision about how products are displayed and presented. For example, if your brand promotes sustainability, durable custom poly mailing bags, eco-friendly packaging and products placed in natural, earthy displays can reinforce this commitment. If your brand is all about luxury, high-end materials, sophisticated lighting, and elegant displays should reflect that premium experience.

2. Consistency Across All Touchpoints

Consistency is key when aligning merchandising with brand identity. Every touchpoint—whether in-store, online, or on social media—should reflect the same brand values, language, and visual style. From your store’s layout to your product packaging, consistency fosters trust and ensures that customers know what to expect.

For example, if your brand’s visual identity includes a minimalist design with a monochrome color palette, ensure that this aesthetic carries over into your product displays, online store, and even your social media presence. When everything aligns, customers immediately recognize your brand, which builds loyalty and trust.

3. Create Immersive Experiences

Effective merchandising goes beyond physical displays. It’s about creating an experience that allows customers to engage with your brand on an emotional level. For example, Apple’s retail stores are designed to feel open, clean, and interactive, aligning with their brand identity as a cutting-edge, user-friendly tech company. Their displays encourage customers to touch and engage with products in a way that reflects the brand’s innovation and simplicity.

Similarly, in online merchandising, brands like Glossier have built success through immersive, aesthetically pleasing visuals and an easy-to-navigate website that aligns with their minimalist, modern brand personality.

4. Highlight Your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is the unique combination of functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits that your products offer to customers. When merchandising, ensure that your products not only align with your brand’s personality but also communicate the value they provide. Whether it’s through product placement, signage, or promotional offers, highlight what makes your brand special and why customers should care.

If your brand stands for high-quality, organic beauty products, ensure that the display communicates the purity and effectiveness of the product. This could be achieved through natural materials in your displays, informative product descriptions, and clear messaging that communicates the health benefits of using your products.

5. Leverage Services for Personalized Experiences

Personalized shopping experiences—such as customized product recommendations, tailored offers, or augmented reality (AR) displays—can make your brand feel more relatable and relevant to your customers. These personalized interactions help customers feel seen and valued, which enhances their emotional connection to your brand. In a crowded market, providing a unique, tailored experience can set your business apart and encourage loyalty. For example, by using custom packaging provided by Arka, businesses can elevate their branding efforts by offering personalized touches that resonate with individual customers. Custom packaging not only reflects the brand’s identity but also creates a memorable unboxing experience, which has been shown to increase customer satisfaction and drive repeat purchases. By aligning these personalized elements with your brand’s core values and aesthetics, you can craft a shopping experience that feels more intimate and thoughtful, ultimately encouraging deeper customer engagement and increasing sales.

The Bottom Line: Drive Sales Through Aligned Branding and Merchandising

Aligning your merchandising efforts with your brand identity is not just about creating attractive product displays. It’s about crafting a cohesive, immersive experience that resonates with your customers and drives long-term loyalty. By ensuring that your brand’s values, personality, and visual style are reflected in every aspect of your merchandising—from product assortment to store design—you create a unified, memorable experience that increases sales and builds lasting connections with your audience.

What is Synonym Management

A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in a given language. Without proper synonyms in place, a search query may not match any products, resulting in either:

• A zero results page, leading to a missed sales opportunity, or
• a partial match, where the search engine returns although returns some relevant products, but not all.

You cannot expect shoppers to know your store’s product terminology. Instead, you need a system to understand visitors’ search intent and set up synonyms so they can find what they’re looking for, regardless of the specific product naming conventions.

Adding synonyms to keywords helps increase the relevant result count for different search queries. You can also set negative synonyms to eliminate irrelevant results. There are even more synonym options, such as bi-directional synonyms or product synonyms, you can check this article for details.

What makes synonym management difficult and time consuming?

• Prioritization

There can be tens of thousands of different search terms that visitors are searching for on a webstore, so it is impossible to set up proper synonyms for all of them, you need to efficiently select the most common terms to handle.

• Finding the right synonym

Identifying the correct synonyms for search terms is challenging. It requires understanding customer intent and ensuring the selected synonyms accurately match the products they are looking for.

Strategies for effective synonym management

Search term prioritization and finding the right synonyms require understanding and analyzing your search data.

When you’re getting started, a common practice is that you should look at popular search queries that have a low click-through rate (CTR).

Another useful tactic is investigating common search terms that shoppers use but then click on different results.

Salesforce B2C Commerce offers built-in Search Analytics that help you understand how users interact with search results. By tracking popular search terms and products, you can make search results more relevant and increase the conversion rate for your online store.

If you would like to have more granular and complex analytics, you can do so with various third-party vendors from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Synonym management in Salesforce B2C Commerce

Salesforce B2C Commerce offers built-in synonym management. You can configure synonyms and negative synonyms for each search term. Salesforce offers brand synonyms too, which are automatically generated for all the products in your product catalog (by the product system object’s brand attribute values). You can turn this feature off.

Using AI Search to minimize manual synonym management

Based on what’s discussed above, you can get a feeling that manual synonym management is a very meticulous and time consuming, but also critical task for your online store.

One of the main use cases for Artificial Intelligence platforms, like Salesforce’s Einstein 1 is that they can minimize such manual optimization tasks, so they are especially helpful in this case too.

AIs helps automating synonym management by the language model they leverage. Their model inherently identifies similar terms, and this functionality can directly be utilized for generating and maintaining synonyms.

AI models utilize vector databases, where every product in a retailer’s product catalog is vectorized. The model then calculates the nearest neighbors of a query vector to return products with the closest relation to the query. This process is natively able to find similar keywords too based on closeness in the vector space.

For example, some SFCC third-party providers offer features that automatically recommend problematic keywords that need synonyms to be set, and some even suggest specific synonyms for these keywords.

You can find even more use cases of AI in the E-commerce industry in this blog post.

Wrap Up

Synonym management is crucial for optimizing search results in online stores, but it is a time-consuming and complex task. Traditionally, retailers manually tag terms and products with relevant synonyms to ensure customers find what they’re searching even when not knowing the exact product names.

Advanced AI technologies now allow for the automation of this process, saving valuable time. AI models, like Salesforce’s Einstein 1, utilize vector databases to identify and suggest relevant synonyms automatically, enhancing search relevancy and boosting conversion rates.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where online shopping goes something like this:

While ChatGPT can recommend products by name, which shoppers can then go search online; it can also provide links directly to online stores, helping the product discovery process:

Having ChatGPT recommend links to products listed directly in your E-commerce store can be an important channel for Ecommerce product discovery and increase your conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction.

We’ll dive into the concrete things you need to do to optimize your online store for product discovery for AI search, but don’t forget to start with the basics – building your brand reputation.

I asked ChatGPT why it selected those specific links and here’s what is said:

So while you’re building your brand reputation, here are some more granular steps to optimize online product discovery for ChatGPT. Let’s get started!

1. Detailed Product Data

When optimizing your E-commerce store for product discoverability on GPT-like search tools, you need to make sure your product data is rich and structured correctly.

Currently, ChatGPT only provides answers in text format (no images), so when thinking about how to make your products appear there, focus on the following:

Metadata and Attributes

You already know the importance of keeping your product data up-to-date. It’s also essential in this context.

To surface products on ChatGPT, make sure each product has comprehensive metadata: product details, availability, categories, tags, and all available attributes (for example: size, color, brand, material).

Be sure to include multiple high-resolution images with detailed alt text so AI systems can understand all the information on the product page.

Use Structured Data

Make sure your data is structed in a way that AI systems (likeChatGPT) can read. JSON-LD is a common schema markup.

Doing this helps ChatGPT understand all of the products’ details.

2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Optimization

You need to optimize your product listings for natural language processing, too. Think about how people use generative AI tools and how conversational they are. This type of information, and style, should be mirrored in your product metadata.

Keyword Management

You can do this by adding natural language keywords and phrases to product categories or product tags. Think about what people are likely to search for in relation to this product. Even better, think about what they might be asking ChatGPT in order to for it to return this specific product.

If you need some inspiration, you can always ask ChatGPT for guidance and use that as direct input.

Synonym Management

As an online retailer, you already know the importance of synonym management. Relevant and thorough synonym work is also important when optimizing product discoverability for ChatGPT.

When thinking of what (natural) keywords to add to your product description and tags, be sure to add synonyms to have comprehensive coverage across a wide range of search intent.

Conversational Phrases

When creating product descriptions, write them in a conversational tone, so it fits in with ChatGPT’s style.

This gives you a better chance of being picked up and directly used by the algorithm.

If you already have comprehensive product descriptions and not many resources to re-write them, directly use ChatGPT to do so.

3. Content Strategy & Optimization

The more conversational-style text you have on your E-commerce store, the better for surfacing products for ai search engines.

Think back to the first example here, where I asked it for hiking pant recommendations. The final sentence in ChatGPT’s answer is most likely a summarization of user reviews and FAQ answers.

Conversational Content

FAQs and buying guides are great places to start when creating ChatGPT-favored content both about your brand and specifically about your products. You can also create blog posts and product comparisons to help ChatGPT and your shoppers decide which products to buy.

ChatGPT can use this conversational information to elaborate on your products in a wider range of conversations.

Product Reviews

You already know user reviews are important in helping shoppers decide on which products to buy.

These shopper reviews of products might also be one of the most important aspects to include in your E-commerce store as this content can be used to enhance product descriptions and answer questions shoppers ask ChatGPT. 

You can also leverage AI to summarize reviews on specific products, to condense them to 1-2 sentences including pros and cons, to make hundreds of reviews easily digestible for shoppers.

Consistent Formatting

Keep consistent formatting throughout your website so ChatGPT can predictably find relevant information. To do this, use clear headers and bullet points to break up content wherever possible.

4. API Integration

After you’ve put in so much work enriching your product data, getting shopper reviews, and creating conversational-style content, you need to make sure ChatGPT can actually access all that information

You need to provide an API that ChatGPT can access in order to pull all of this information in real-time to make sure it can reflect current availability and pricing.

5. SEO Best Practices

You’re already using SEO to improve product discovery on the web, the same principles apply in this context.

Make sure to focus on the following areas to make your products discoverable on ChatGPT:

On-site SEO: Make sure you optimize traditionally important on-site elements such as: titles, meta descriptions, headings, and URLs for relevant keywords

Link building: Cross-link your internal pages by connecting products and related content to improve navigation. Also, build backlinks from external websites with a high Domain Ranking. This helps build your site’s credibility with search engines.

To streamline your link building efforts, consider using tools that can automate the process. By incorporating smart strategies, you can enhance your site’s link profile while saving time. For example, you can use link building automation software to simplify the identification of high-quality backlink opportunities. This approach helps you scale your efforts and achieve more impactful results in less time.

Loading times and site optimization: Your site should load quickly in order to provide a great browsing experience in addition to improving your SEO. To do this, make sure you optimize your mobile site and follow search best practices for mobile devices.

6. Work with ChatGPT or AI Developers

Working with an expert in the field can help you uncover areas to optimize or help you solve more technical challenges.

These developers can help you figure out how ChatGPT interacts with your product data and which issues are most pressing. They can also help you provide anonymized data to help ChatGPT better understand your product catalog and how it relates directly to shopper queries.

Conclusion

Shoppers will soon use ChatGPT to discover products, so retailers need to start thinking about ChatGPT as another avenue of product discovery to lift customer experience and boost customer loyalty.

By focusing on the strategies outlined above, E-commerce retailers can make their product catalogs and content discoverable by ChatGPT and gain a competitive edge.

This is just the beginning of conversational commerce; retailers can ride the wave further by offering their own ChatGPT-like chat-bot on their online store. Start diving into conversational commerce here.

Role of Product Pages in E-commerce SEO?

There are three main ways leads find your website pages on Google:

1. Your blog articles are found from informational searches. These come from people only looking for information and don’t have a high purchase intent.
   
2. Your home page is found via navigational searches. These people are looking specifically for your brand and probably already know you.
   
3. Your product and category pages are found from transactional searches. These people don’t know about your business yet and want to buy something.

That’s why SEO for product pages is the most important aspect of search engine optimization for E-commerce stores. They attract new customers to your store. Since many of these shoppers are interested in making a purchase the product page can convert them with good visuals, descriptions, and user-friendly navigation.

Investing in product page SEO means you’ll get an influx of new leads who don’t need nurturing, who, in turn, convert on the spot and drive your sales.

SEO Product Page Essentials

Before you optimize product pages, make sure your technical optimization is up to Google’s standards. Check your website with the Lighthouse tool, improve Core Web Vitals if needed, and double-check crawlability and website security. Check out other online shopping problems that are easy to eliminate.

To further enhance your technical SEO, ensure that your website’s URL structure is clean, concise, and user-friendly. Avoid using unnecessary parameters and focus on creating SEO-friendly URLs that are easy for both users and search engines to understand. Implement proper redirects to prevent broken links and ensure smooth navigation. It’s also essential to check your XML sitemap for any errors, ensuring it’s up-to-date and submitted to Google Search Console. You can hire technical SEO consultants to guide you through the best practices and help optimize your site’s performance. Additionally, leverage hreflang tags if you have a multilingual website, ensuring that search engines show the correct version of your pages to international users. Lastly, monitor your site’s health regularly with tools like Google Search Console to detect issues like crawl errors and indexing problems before they impact your rankings.

You’ll also have to do link-building by submitting your site to business directories, writing guest posts, and distributing your content. This will increase your site’s authority in Google’s eyes and increase the odds of your product pages ranking higher in SERP.

With that said, here are the nine things to enhance your product pages and gather more organic search traffic.

Keyword Research

The first step towards optimizing a product page for search engines is finding the right keywords. Keywords are phrases Google users typically use to find the products to purchase.

A single product page can be found with multiple keywords. For instance, a product page for a handheld fan can be found with the following keywords:

• Handheld fan
• Personal fan
• Portable fan
• Battery powered fan
• Mini fan
• Fan that runs on batteries
• Handheld electric fan
• Handheld cooling fan

Your job in this step is to find a list of keywords that would represent your product pages. The more relevant the keywords are, the more traffic it can potentially attract. How do you do that? The fastest way is to use a specialized SEO tool. For instance, the SE Ranking keyword search tool can provide thousands of suggested keywords along with important metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, and search intent.

The last one is especially important—you want only commercial and transactional keywords to represent your product pages. Users with informational queries will be disappointed because they are searching for information, not a product.

If you have already done keyword research before and want to find more similar keywords for a specific product page, you can input the keyword manually and go from there. You can also import your keyword list into the tool to do it in bulk.

You can also get the list of keywords you can start working with by exporting a performance report from Google Search Console, or your product list from the CRM.

Once you have a list of keywords, group them and assign them to individual product pages.

Product Page Content Optimization

Once you have that list grouped, optimize product pages for these keywords. Look up which keyword in the group has the most search volume and use it as the main keyword.

Now, you’ll have to add your keywords to the following places on your product page.

• Product Title: contains the main keyword and combinations with other keywords with high search volume.
• Meta Title Tag: contains the main keyword and combinations with other keywords with high search volume.
• Meta Description Tag: contains the main keyword and is aimed towards convincing users to click on your link in SERP.
• Headings: contain the most prominent keywords, H1 contains the main keyword, and other headings contain supporting ones.
• URL Slug: contains the main keyword.
• Product Description: contains all keywords in the list in an authentic way.

The most important thing when it comes to optimizing the product description is not to overoptimize it.

First and foremost, you want your description to be informative for the user.

Add keywords only where they make sense, and don’t add more than a couple of instances of the main keyword. You can add other keywords just once

Also, add user-generated content to the pages. Having customer reviews on the product page adds unique content and updates the page, both of which are good for SEO.

It may be hard to optimize hundreds of product pages that an E-commerce site typically would have.

If you have to prioritize, start with the low-hanging fruit. Find pages with the potential to rank well—pages in the top 20 for a keyword with low keyword difficulty. 

Image Optimization

Keyword-optimize your image files. To do this, add the main keyword to the alt tag of the image and to the image file name. The alt tag should describe the image, so don’t stuff it with keywords.

There are other areas for optimization when it comes to images. First, keep the size of the images to a minimum. Large image files take a while to load and can slow down the page loading time. This negatively impacts both user experience and SEO for product pages.

Also, try to have the images fit the optimal aspect ratios for appearing on SERP. Your images can appear in rich results and the image search feature.

The best aspect ratio for product images is 1 to 1, with resolutions ranging from 300 x 300 to 1200 x 1200. Make sure the image still looks good when it’s resized in SERP.

Video Optimization

Sometimes, videos can appear in search results, too.

Mostly, videos will appear in informational or commercial searches—searches with the intent to find information on using a product.

The majority of videos linked here are hosted on YouTube. If you have a YouTube channel, make sure to add keywords to the title and description of the video.

If you’re hosting the video on your E-commerce site, compress the video for faster loading, add VideoObject Schema, and create a captivating thumbnail.

Good ideas for product page videos are unboxing and product guides.

Helping Features

Adding helpful widgets relevant to your product can help both SEO and user experience. For instance, a calculator for vitamin pills, an AI try-on feature for fashion or makeup products, or a size-fitting assistant.

The impact on the UX is obvious. In terms of E-commerce product page SEO, it can increase the number of links to your product pages because people love to share handy widgets like that.

Structured Data for Product Pages

SEO is not only about optimizing the page to appear higher in search. It also includes optimizing SERP design. This includes creating a title and description that entices users to click as well as creating rich results like these.

To have your product page display images of the product, rating, and price, use structured data or Schema markup. It’s a JSON-LD document that includes all the relevant information about your product.

There are several ways you can create structured data.

• Write the JSON code yourself.
• Use an AI tool to create it.
• Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
• Use a plug-in native to the E-commerce platform you use.

Make sure to check your product pages with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool before you make the changes live.

Avoiding Cannibalization

Often, E-commerce stores have dozens of nearly identical products, like different color variations of the same handheld fan. If you create a different page for each of them, it won’t be good for product page SEO, as Google doesn’t like duplicate content. These pages are also likely to cannibalize each other—your pages will compete with each other in SERP.

To avoid this, don’t create unnecessary pages and group similar products on one page.

Sometimes, you have to, though. For instance, when there’s a sizeable search demand for “pink handheld fan” and “white handheld fan,” and you want to serve your audience by showing exactly what they want.

In this case, make sure to write unique product descriptions for these pages and point a canonical link to the main product page.

Mobile-Friendly Design

As over 50% of internet traffic is mobile, Google prefers to rank mobile-friendly pages higher in SERP, especially so for mobile searches. You can check how well your website works on different devices with the Chrome Inspect tool. It lets you change between different devices and aspect ratios.

Run a Lighthouse report on the page to see how well it loads on mobile platforms. It will show a brief analysis of performance problems.

To improve performance, minimize JavaScript execution time, remove time-blocking resources, and minimize JS and CSS on the page.

If you’re using an E-commerce platform like Shopify, try testing performance with and without plug-ins, especially older ones.

Internal linking

The only way Google can know a page exists is if a link points to it. You need to create internal links to your products to help them get discovered and indexed. A lot of internal links pointing to a specific page will signal to Google that the page is more important than others.

To help with crawlability, create a user-friendly linking system. Link to your product pages from:

• Navigation menu
• Sitemap
• Category pages
• Other product pages

The last one can also improve your site’s UX and average sale value, as they often are in the form of product suggestions.

Use a plug-in to create those product suggestions automatically for each product page.

If you want to improve the SEO of a specific page, for instance, a page that has the potential to rank well for its keywords, leave additional links from your website.

Your best options are adding a link from the homepage in the form of a banner or a navigation menu link, then adding links from your blog content. Prioritize it in product suggestion sections or add a bestsellers section.

Summary

Optimizing product pages for search doesn’t take as much work as off-page SEO. Follow this guide and see how the positions change in a few weeks when the page is indexed.

Change your approach as you track the key metrics and work closely to optimize your pages, starting with the ones that have the most potential. Once you find the right SEO approach to your specific market based on these pages, expand it to the rest of the site.

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