Ecommerce product discovery: Help shoppers find more

Shoppers don’t normally touch your search bar when they first land on your ecommerce website. They will scroll, click through categories, and follow recommendations instead, which is exactly why ecommerce product discovery matters as much as search does.

Product discovery covers every path a shopper takes to find a product. If your website can get it right, those browsers might turn into buyers. Get it wrong, and shoppers leave without ever knowing you had what they wanted.

What ecommerce product discovery means

Product discovery is how shoppers find products without a specific search term in mind.

Search handles the shopper who already knows what they want and types it in. Product discoverability covers everyone else:

• The shopper scrolling a category page
• The one who clicks a recommended item
• The one drawn in by a homepage banner

That’s the browsing side of what’s often called search and discovery in ecommerce. Leading teams now treat browsing and search as one connected job.

Example: a shopper opens a fashion site with no product in mind, browses “New arrivals,” clicks a dress that catches their eye, then buys a similar one suggested at checkout.

They never use the search bar once. The site’s category layout, product cards, and recommendation engine still find them a personalized match.

That’s product discovery working.

Why product discovery breaks down for high SKU catalogs

The bigger your catalog gets, the easier it is for your shoppers to get lost.

A small store can get by with a simple menu and a few filters. Once you’re managing thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) across dozens of categories, that setup starts to break.

Here’s why:

• Your search comes up empty: A meaningful share of searches on most sites come back with nothing. Every one of those empty searches is a shopper who typed something specific and got nothing back.
• Your filters hit dead ends: Say a shopper picks a brand and a size. If your product data doesn’t support that exact combination, they get stuck. On a small catalog, someone can catch this by hand. On a catalog with thousands of SKUs and constant new arrivals, that’s not possible.
• Your sorting can hide good products: Sorting every category by “newest” or “best-selling” treats every shopper the same way. In a big catalog, your customers want very different things. One-size-fits-all sorting hides plenty of products they’d actually want, sometimes on page 4 or further.

Here’s how those breakdowns map to their root causes:

These problems rarely show up alone. Once your catalog gets big and complex, they tend to pile up. And once a shopper runs into one, they usually don’t stick around for the next. They will just look into your competitors’ sites instead.

Core strategies to improve ecommerce product discovery

You already know where shoppers get stuck from the previous section. The good thing is that each of these problems has a direct fix. A few extra tools can take you even further.

Here’s the order that works, starting with your foundation:

• Category pages: This is your foundation. Fix your structure and sorting so one click lands shoppers where they need to be. Then add performance-based sorting on top, so your best products show up first.
• Faceted navigation: Once your category pages work, tighten your filters. Build them around what shoppers actually search for. Test the filter combinations yourself, so you catch dead ends before your shoppers do.
• Search relevance tuning: Next, clean up your search box. Handle synonyms, typos, and plain language. That way, “warm jacket” and “insulated coat” both pull up the same products.
• Autocomplete and query suggestions: This builds directly on that last point. Guide shoppers toward searches your catalog can actually answer, before they even hit enter. That alone prevents a lot of the empty searches from happening in the first place.
• Personalized recommendations: With the basics solid, personalize what each shopper sees. Use what someone has browsed and bought to shape their recommendations everywhere on your site, from the homepage to the cart. Now two shoppers can land on the same category page and see completely different products, based on what each one actually wants.

How to build a product discovery strategy

You’ll get better results from a short, repeatable process than from a one-time overhaul. Here’s what that looks like, step by step.

Audit your current catalog and category structure

Start here. Before you fix anything, you need to know where shoppers actually drop off.

• Check your attribute data. Missing or inconsistent details quietly break your filters.
• Check your category depth. If it takes 4 or 5 clicks to reach a product, your category structure is too complicated.

This audit tells you exactly where to focus next.

Set merchandising rules for key categories

Once you know where the gaps are, fix how your categories sort.

Manual merchandising works fine until your catalog gets too big to update by hand. That’s where rules come in.

• Base your sorting on real performance data (conversion rate, margin, or inventory level). This keeps your category pages fresh without anyone reordering products by hand every week.
• If you’re on Shopify Plus, you can run these rules through a catalog management app. That way, your IT team doesn’t need to get involved every time you run a seasonal update.

Layer in personalization and recommendations

With your categories sorted the right way, you’re ready to personalize what each shopper sees.

Behavioral data does the heavy lifting here. Say a shopper has browsed hiking boots 3 times. They should see different homepage recommendations than someone visiting for the first time.

Making that happen in real time takes constant work behind the scenes, like pulling in behavioral, catalog, and content data, then feeding it straight into what shows up on the page. Nosto’s real-time data engine is built to handle exactly that.

Once your catalog data is clean, this is usually where you’ll see the biggest jump in engagement.

Measure discovery performance against conversion

Finally, tie all of this back to revenue.

• Track category click-through and search usage rate alongside conversion rate and average order value. On their own, they don’t tell you much.
• Watch your zero-results rate and search-to-purchase rate, too. These show you exactly where shoppers are still getting stuck.

That connection is what turns your discovery project from a nice-to-have into a number your CFO actually cares about.

Our favorite product discovery platform for ecommerce

We’re biased here, but let us explain why. Nosto was built to solve exactly the problems covered above.

It treats search, merchandising, and recommendations as one connected system. That means the same behavioral data powering a product recommendation also shapes your search rankings and category sorting, all in real time.

Here’s how that plays out across the three of our core products:

• Personalized Search: Understands what a shopper actually means when they type something in. It blends keyword matching with semantic search, so their plain-language query and their past behavior both shape what they see.
• Category Merchandising: Applies performance-based rules on its own. You stop having to reorder products by hand every time your catalog grows.
• Predictive Product Recommendations: Uses real-time behavior to show relevant products on your homepage, category pages, cart, and post-purchase screens.

Behind all 3 sits Huginn, Nosto’s AI commerce agent. Huginn handles the ongoing tuning that used to take your merchandising team hours every week.

The results back this up. Nosto was recognized in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery.

One Nosto customer, Credo Beauty, runs search, merchandising, product recommendations, and content personalization through Nosto across a catalog of over 5,000 SKUs. Using Personalized Search alone, they saw:

• An 8.65% increase in conversion rate through search.
• $4.2 million in ecommerce sales attributed to Personalized Search.

Another Nosto customer, Marine Layer, rolled out Predictive Product Recommendations on just two pages. Shoppers who engaged with those recommendations, compared to those who didn’t:

• Were 2x more likely to convert.
• Spent 31.5% more per order.
• Generated 125% higher revenue per session.

If you’re running a high-SKU catalog on Shopify Plus or a similar platform, unified data and AI-driven merchandising together tend to matter more than any single feature on its own.

If you want to see what that looks like on your own catalog, you can book a demo with our team.

How AI strengthens ecommerce product discovery

AI has become standard in product discovery for one simple reason. It solves problems that keyword search alone can’t.

Here’s how that plays out in practice:

• Hybrid search fixes your zero-results problem: Older, keyword-only search only works if a shopper types the exact words sitting in your product titles. Hybrid search blends keyword matching with semantic understanding, so a shopper can type “something warm for hiking in October” and still get relevant results, even if none of those exact words appear anywhere in your catalog.
• Predictive recommendations learn from real behavior: A shopper’s clicks, time on page, and past purchases all feed into what gets shown next. Two shoppers browsing the same category page can see completely different products, based on what each one is actually likely to want.

AI cuts down on the manual tuning your catalog needs day to day. You still decide the goals, like which products to prioritize during a launch or push during a clearance.

Future of product discovery in ecommerce

The next shift in product discovery happens before a shopper even reaches your site.

AI shopping agents inside tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode are already starting to research, compare, and in some cases buy products on a shopper’s behalf. This isn’t a small trend either.

A January 2026 study from the IBM Institute for Business Value, done with the National Retail Federation (surveying over 18,000 shoppers across 23 countries), found that 41% of consumers already use AI to research products as part of their buying journey.

The same study points to just how far this behavior has spread:

• 33% of consumers use AI to look for reviews before buying.
• 31% use AI to search for deals and promotions.
• 29% use AI to personalize or design products to their preferences.
• 26% use AI to evaluate trade-offs between options.
• Global use of AI applications like ChatGPT and Gemini has grown 62% over the past two years.
• 70% of retail and consumer products executives say standardized AI integration will be necessary to keep products visible to these tools.

Expect these numbers to keep climbing as more retailers connect their product data to these platforms.

That changes what “discoverable” means for you. Your product data now needs to be readable by AI agents as well as by shoppers and search engines. That means structured data, accurate attributes, and clear product descriptions matter more than ever.

This connects to the bigger shift happening across the industry: personalization, search, and merchandising are converging into one connected system.

Connect your own data sources now, and you’ll have an easier time adapting as shopper behavior keeps moving between browsing, searching, and asking an AI agent to handle both.

Conclusion

Shoppers decide fast. If they don’t find what they want in seconds, they leave for good. That’s what weak product discovery costs you. Sales you never see.

Nosto closes that gap. It’s an agentic Commerce Experience Platform (CXP) that uses AI to personalize your search, merchandising, recommendations, emails, and on-site content, all from one place.

Over 1,500 brands use it to turn browsing into buying, backed by real shopper data. Marc Jacobs drives 9% of its online revenue this way. O’Neill saw a 43% jump in conversions when they first started working with us.

Setup is fast, and it won’t slow your site down.

Every day you wait, competitors are already using AI to win these shoppers.

Book a demo and see what Nosto can do for your store.