Picture your store’s best products sitting on page three of search results while an inferior version takes the top spot. That’s not a relevance problem — it’s a merchandising problem. And it’s exactly what searchandising is designed to fix.

Searchandising blends merchandising logic with search technology to give you control over what shoppers see when they search. In this guide, we’ll break down how it works, which techniques actually drive conversions, and how to measure whether it’s working.

What is Searchandising?

Searchandising, also referred to as search merchandising or searchandizing, is a strategic way of organizing search results and promoting specific products to align with your business goals.

searchandising definition

Just as physical retail stores employ merchandising strategies to optimize their store layouts highlight sales promotions, eCommerce businesses utilize searchandising to increase conversions and drive sales in their online shopping platforms.

Online platforms rely on searchandising to ensure that customers see products they want and engage with items that resonate with their needs and preferences.

Searchandising is just one piece of the eCommerce merchandising puzzle.
If you’re ready to level up your entire strategy—from product discovery to conversion—don’t miss our deep dive into eCommerce merchandising.

How does Searchandising work?

Searchandising works by blending your search engine’s standard relevance rules with business-specific rules you define. The result: search results that are customized per query based on both what’s relevant and what you want to prioritize.

The two layers of searchandised search

Relevance layer — Your search engine’s default behavior. It matches the user’s query to products in your catalog based on keywords, product attributes, and relevance signals. This runs automatically.

Merchandising layer — Your rules applied on top. Boost this product for this query. Bury out-of-stock items. Pin a specific result to position one. Inject a promotional banner. This is where searchandising happens.

Advanced searchandising adds a third element: AI and behavioral data. The system learns from what users click, buy, and skip — and adjusts results automatically over time, without manual intervention. A customer who consistently shops for outdoor gear sees different results for “jacket” than a customer with a fashion purchase history, even though they typed the same query.

What customers actually search for

Your customers search in more ways than you might expect. Beyond product names and brand names, common search types include: exact descriptions, slang and acronyms, category terms, themes (“office wear”), problems they’re solving (“non-slip sole”), product functionality (“waterproof”), reference codes, and non-product queries like FAQs or shipping questions. A solid searchandising setup accounts for all of them.

Searchandising vs. manual merchandising

Most stores that haven’t implemented searchandising aren’t doing nothing — they’re doing things manually. A team member adjusts product order in the CMS before a big sale. Someone pins a product to the top of a category before Christmas. It works, sort of, until it doesn’t scale.

Manual merchandising has three problems:

It’s reactive. Changes happen after someone notices a problem, not before. By the time you’ve spotted that out-of-stock products are appearing at the top of your best-performing search query, you’ve already lost sales.

It doesn’t persist. Campaign rules set manually for Black Friday quietly stay in place in January. No one remembers to remove them.

It can’t match query-level complexity. Your store might handle thousands of unique search queries per week. Manual adjustment can cover your top ten. Searchandising covers all of them, automatically.

The same logic applies beyond search. If you want that same level of control over your category pages — what appears first, which filters show, how products are sorted — that’s where category merchandising comes in.

Why is Searchandising Important for eCommerce Stores?

When your customers shop online, they often use the search bar to find what they want. In fact, about 30% of online shoppers use the search bar before they buy something, and more than half of online sales come from people using the search bar.

Nowadays, customers expect stores to understand their preferences and show them products they might be interested in. But, if a store can’t control what shows up in the search results, how can it make sure that it’s showing products that match what customers like? 

This is where “searchandising” comes into play.

Searchandising gives online stores the ability to control what their customers see when they use the eCommerce search bar. It allows them to change the rules to fit their goals and try out different approaches to see what works best. Stores can searchandise by displaying products that align with their customers’ preferences while also helping the store achieve its business goals.

Searchandising strategies and examples

There’s plenty of searchandising strategies out there, each of them able to improve the performance of your product catalog. We’ll show you the most important ones, as well as the ease with which you can implement them using Doofinder.

Product boosting and burying

Boosting promotes specific products to higher positions in search results for a defined query. Burying pushes them down — used for out-of-stock items, discontinued lines, or low-margin products you’d rather not lead with.

Flying Spares, an automotive parts retailer on Magento with a catalogue of 250,000 products, uses boosting rules to ensure customers always see the most relevant and most profitable items first. Their boost logic factors in stock levels, new arrivals, clearance status, bestsellers, product condition, profit margins, and preferred brands — all configured from Doofinder’s admin panel without developer involvement.

“Doofinder’s ability to boost certain products and manage search results through a dedicated app was exactly what we were looking for.” — Marco Bonanni, Head of Marketing, Flying Spares

Boosting rules can run globally (in-stock items across all queries) or at the query level (a specific product only when someone searches a particular term). The granularity is what makes them powerful.

doofinder automatic boosting

Doofinder allows for both manual, and automatic boosting. This is a mechanism that automatically rewards products that have been performing well recently, a great way to make sure your catalog is always relevant and performing well.

Synonyms and redirects

A significant portion of zero-results pages aren’t a catalog gap — they’re a language gap. Your catalog says “trainers.” Your customer types “sneakers.” Without a synonym rule, they get nothing — even though you have exactly what they want.

Redirects handle non-product searches. 34% of users search for non-product content like “returns” or “order tracking” — yet 39% of eCommerce sites don’t support these queries. A redirect sends them directly to the right page instead of a useless results page.

Search Personalization

Deliver contextually relevant content personalized to each user’s search history, behaviors, and preferences.

For example, if someone often searches for the brand ‘Yves Saint Laurent’, an online make-up store can show them products from that brand when searching for ‘Foundation’, instead of a randomized brand. This makes the person more likely to buy since they’re receiving the most relevant results for their personal preferences.

yves saint laurant foundations

Which parameters are taken into account to customize the search results depends on the tool. For Doofinder, the parameters are title, price, brand and categories.

Search Rules

Searchandise by manually boosting or burying search results based on seasonal trends, business goals, and other objectives.

searchandise

For example, during the holiday season, eCommerce businesses can apply search rules to prioritize products that are relevant to the festive period. For example, a clothing retailer might boost winter coats in search results and bury swimsuits to align with seasonal trends. 

Guided Search Filters

Quickly lead users to relevant products with tools like guided search filters for quick product discovery.

searchandising

For example, if a customer is looking for engagement rings, a guided search feature can assist users in narrowing down their preferences by asking them about stone type, stone shape, and carat size. This not only enhances the user experience but also accelerates product discovery.

Banners in search results

Banners injected directly into the search results layer turn search into an active part of your promotional strategy — not just a product list.

When a user searches “sale,” a campaign banner appears at the top before product results. When they search “running shoes” during a seasonal campaign, a contextual banner surfaces the relevant promotion right at the moment of highest intent.

searchandizing

For example, a toy store may run a campaign for their extra stock of Nerf guns and accessories. When users search for keywords related to Nerf, a banner appears at the top of the search results, drawing attention to the Nerf sale. If clicked on, the user would be led to the collection of products for the Nerf sales campaign.

How to measure whether searchandising is working

Zero-results rate

What proportion of searches return no results? The industry average sits around 15%. An active synonym library and properly configured redirects should bring this well below 5%. Your zero-results report is also your best roadmap for what to fix next: every high-volume query with zero results is either a synonym gap or a redirect you haven’t built yet.

If zero-results are a recurring problem, an AI Shopping Assistant can help close the gap. Unlike keyword search, it handles open-ended and conversational queries that would normally return nothing — “something for a 9-year-old who loves dinosaurs” becomes a product recommendation instead of a dead end. Stores using Doofinder bring their zero-results rate below 1%, compared to an industry average of around 15%.

doofinder ai assistant

Post-search conversion rate

What percentage of searches lead to a purchase? If yours is significantly low, the likely culprits are relevance problems — wrong products surfacing for key queries — which boosting and custom results can directly address.

Click-through rate by query

Low CTR on positions 1–3 for a high-volume query means the wrong products are appearing at the top. That’s a direct signal to apply boost rules. If customers are clicking results at positions 8–15, your top results aren’t matching their intent.

Search-driven revenue

The share of total revenue from customers who used search before purchasing. Track this before and after searchandising changes to calculate direct ROI. A lift in search-driven revenue is the clearest proof that your merchandising rules are working.

Doofinder’s Stats Panel surfaces all of these metrics — zero-results queries, top searches, CTR by position, conversion data, and real-time search analytics — so you can act on what you see, not what you guess.

backoffice doofinder 2

Many dashboards only highlight zero-results pages, but there’s far more valuable data beneath the surface. Doofinder’s search analytics provides deep insights into metrics like search conversion rate, search-driven sales, and more—so you can understand performance clearly and take the right actions with confidence.

Start Searchandising in Your eCommerce

As we’ve discovered, searchandising emerges as a powerful ally for brands seeking to create a customer-centric shopping experience, drive conversions, and boost sales. 

By taking ownership of your search functionality and employing advanced techniques, eCommerce businesses can provide their customers with a personalized, engaging, and efficient shopping journey.

So, are you ready? Doofinder is here to help you start to searchandise your online store! With Doofinder’s powerful search engine features, you can take control of your search engine and implement all of the searchandising strategies mentioned in this article.

Start your free trial with Doofinder today and discover how personalized search results, strategic product promotions, and seamless shopping experiences can transform your business. 

Frequently Asked Questions about Searchandising

Merchandising covers how products are presented across your entire store — category pages, homepage, product pages, email campaigns. Searchandising is specifically the application of merchandising logic to search results. It controls what happens when a customer types a query, not how your store looks when they browse.

Searchandising applies business rules at the query level — the same boost rule fires for every user who searches “winter jacket.” Personalization applies behavioral logic at the user level — two users typing the same query see different results based on their individual histories. Advanced platforms combine both: business rules run first, then AI personalization layers on top.

Yes. Doofinder’s searchandising is configured entirely through a visual admin panel. You set the rules — boost this product, bury out-of-stock items, add a synonym — and the platform executes them across all queries, in real time, with no code required.

Pull your top 20 search queries by volume. For each, check the CTR on positions 1–3 and the conversion rate. High volume + low CTR = your first boosting opportunity. Then check your zero-results report. Any query generating zero results with meaningful volume is a synonym or redirect you can action today.

Track zero-results rate, post-search conversion rate, and CTR by query before and after making changes. Two weeks minimum before drawing conclusions — behavioral signals need time to accumulate. A reduction in zero-results queries and an increase in post-search conversion rate are the two clearest indicators that your searchandising is having an effect.