How To Personalize The Shopify Search Bar Experience

With a lot of products available to your store visitors and in varieties, the Shopify search function is one that you’d expect them to use very frequently. The Shopify search bar becomes a very important part of every eCommerce store and for the entire eCommerce businesses out there.

Presenting your search bar to visitors in its default plain form, however, could serve as a stumbling block in getting enough conversions or gaining the most out of the search function. As there are a lot of additional elements to optimize your search bar with, especially with your competitors implementing every strategy to get the better of you, giving your visitors a seamless search experience goes a long way.

How do you do this? This article presents you with everything you need to know about personalizing your Shopify Store’s search bar experience, from the right tool to use to how to add a search app on Shopify to the exact features that help you accomplish this. Let’s get right in.

What To Use

The default Shopify search bar settings present you with customization options but how far do these go in personalizing the experience for your visitors. No doubt, an external application, especially one dedicated to your Shopify search bar functionality, serves the best purpose. Thankfully, to customize your search bar, Shopify permits integrations and here is where Sparq comes in.

Sparq is an AI-powered Shopify search app integrated with over 600 websites, offering you a host of features and solutions to optimize and extend the functionality of your Shopify search bar. Of its barrage of intuitive and highly effective features are options dedicated to customizing your search bar. But first here is how to integrate the app with your Shopify store.

How To Integrate The Sparq App

Integrating the Sparq app is straightforward. If you’re logged into your Shopify store’s admin portal, head to the Sparq Search App page on the Shopify app marketplace and simply click on the “add app” button. If not logged in, you just provide your Shopify Shop URL and select the “Install App” button.

Once this is done, you head over to your Apps dashboard, click on the Sparq Search app, and wait for data sync. You then toggle the “Enable Search Integration” button in the dashboard and your Sparq Search bar comes to life. Sparq starts an initial indexing process to collect data on products, collections, and pages on your store and the duration of this process depends on your product count. You could check out the Preferences tab to apply some personal changes before fully launching your advanced search app.

Personalizing The Search Bar Experience

Now, for your Shopify search bar personalization, what are the different options and features Sparq has available to you? With Sparq you have access to:

Custom HTML

• A custom HTML allows you to create and apply your personal HTML elements to reused interfaces on your website or application. With Sparq, a custom HTML is not just easy to implement but gives you an intuitive way of relating with your website visitors.
• Within the search bar, a custom HTML lets you include text elements. Using the Custom HTML on Shopify, edit the search box text, with the displayed text used to talk with or pass a message to your visitors rather than leaving the space blank, plain, and unattractive. You display text like “what are you looking for?” or “tap here to find amazing apparel”, among other attention-grabbing phrases.

Theme Support

• Sparq offers great support for the Shopify theme applied to your eCommerce store. Through intuitive close integration with Shopify, your search bar appearance smoothly fits with your Shopify store’s appearance, meaning you don’t have to worry about a search bar that looks out of place to your visitors.

Custom Banners

• Separated from Sparq’s automated theme support and custom HTML editing, your Shopify search banner comes with some extra customization options of its own, with these relating to access to it. You set it to either appear on just the homepage, specific pages, or all pages. You also set if you want it to appear for everyone or only individuals logged into your eCommerce store. Applying a background image also helps you to further personalize your search banner.

Custom UI

• Sparq also gives you options to customize the appearance of your search bar user interface to just how you want it to be. With a barrage of options available to you, perhaps, the features you may find very useful are those relating to your search bar dropdown interface.
• In the personalization menu, you toggle the display of product ratings on your dropdown interface. Doing this gives your visitors and customers quick access to reviews on products in your store. They don’t need to get into product pages, wasting their precious time looking at how much value a product is. It gets tiring for them and, as there are a lot of other stores out there, you don’t want them going somewhere else.
• Your dropdown interface also comes with some extended customization options. You set the scale on which products are rated as well as the number and colors of stars used to represent ratings. All these undoubtedly give your website visitors a more seamless experience while making use of your search bar.

Result Personalization

• Sparq also lets you personalize the results displayed to your visitors or customers through the use of tags and automation. For tags, you make use of both system-generated tags provided by Shopify or personal tags created by you.
• How are tags implemented? You group or define products by tagging them with certain words or defining elements. You then dictate, through your settings, which tag group should be displayed when visitors make searches and which should not. Whenever analytics is used with this functionality, you know which products attract and convert visitors and use tags to present them with priority (and where certain products don’t generate revenues, you give them less priority in search results through this tagging system).
• You also personalize your results through AI-powered automation. Our AI tool closely tracks the activities of your visitors in your store through the use of cookies. Using collated data, your AI-powered search bar provides results within the dropdown interface representing what frequently catches their interest.

API Access

• Sparq goes an extra step and equips you with an API, giving you extra functionalities and features for your Shopify search bar optimization and personalization. With this API, however, having to integrate other tools helping with your search bar customizations proves particularly useful.

Give Your Visitors The Experience They Deserve

For your eCommerce business to grow, your customers and store visitors play a huge role. Providing the right experience for them is crucial, especially one that creates a personal bond between them and your store.

Your search bar is important to achieve this and with Sparq, you have all you need for these customizations and personalizations at your disposal. Why wait when you can optimize the part of your Shopify store that a lot of your competitors pay little attention to? Sparq is always ready for you, start integrating the advanced Shopify search bar app today.