What you need to know

Your search solution is instrumental to your store's success. We're breaking down the things you need to know before making the final decision.

Making the choice for the best search solution is a tricky one. With all of the available options out there, it's hard to pinpoint which solution you and your team will love.

To get the ball rolling, we have outlined potential search solutions to improve the management, merchandising, search and filtering experience across your store. While there are pros and cons with every search solution. The best choice depends on your budget and what your needs are.

The options

Algolia

• Summary: This is the top search solution across enterprise customers covering websites, apps and eCommerce. It’s a powerful search service that provides a friendly interface, powerful reporting and a well documented client-side library (framework to implement into your site). They are the leader in the space and the product is based in the US with no local technical support.

• Cost: Usage-based, average cost starts at $499 USD and is normally around $899 for a site and product count of your size for basic search features, and upwards of $2000 USD for all features.

• Time: Average lead time to set up an account is 1-2 days, and implementation is around two weeks.

SearchSpring

• Summary: This solution offers a similar feature set to Algolia but is focused on eCommerce search only. They are based in the US but have recently started a small team within APAC to help local merchants. The implementation requires a lot more back and forth between the US team as it’s not as well documented or standardised as Alogia. They have a team that completes the configuration for you as there is no interface for customers to manage this themselves.

• Cost: Usage-based, average cost starts at $499 USD and is normally around $699 for a site and product count of your size, their costs scale based on products and traffic to your site so they require access to Google Analytics before a finalised cost is provided.

• Time: Average lead time to set up an account and implement is around 1-2 months as their set up and contract process is much less plug-and-play.

Reactify Search

• Summary: Reactify Search is specific to eCommerce and the Shopify platform. It's designed to provide enterprise-level features at a more affordable cost and a much friendlier experience. Reactify has a dedicated team in Australia and works closely with merchants to build and enhance the platform based on customer and business needs.

• Cost: Fixed-rate, average costs start at $299 USD for a Shopify Plus store and $99 for additional indexes or product catalogues over 10,000.

• Time: Average lead time to set up an account is 1-2 days and implementation time of one week.

Implementing Reactify Search

The process

Once the account has been set up and contracts finalised, the Reactify team requires around a week for implementation onto your site. During this time the following tasks need to be completed:

• Platform connected into your store

• Platform configured to your production structure

• Rebuild collection template

• Rebuild search results template

• Rebuild instance search

• Configuring the rules and testing

• Training and launch

The implementation cost

For each search solution, the implementation costs are essentially the same. The total time to implement Reactify Search is one week, which costs a total of $5,400 AUD+GST. This covers all the front-end configurations and connects the app to your Shopify themes.