BOBBIPioneer Program
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Pioneer Program Partners
BOBBI Smart Store is in a closed pioneer phase.
Apply — we onboard new partners in small batches.
Product discovery is how shoppers find what they want in your store. When it's hard, they leave. This guide covers the main categories of product discovery tools — site search, filtering, merchandising, recommendations, and visual search — and an emerging conversational approach that guides each shopper to the right product.
Most catalogs are bigger than any single page can show, so a shopper rarely sees everything you sell. Good discovery connects each shopper to the right product fast — before impatience or doubt sends them elsewhere. The less work a visitor has to do to find something relevant, the more likely they are to stay and buy.
Product discovery tools fall into a few broad categories. Most stores combine more than one, depending on catalog size, the kinds of products they sell, and how their shoppers tend to browse.
Search-and-filter tools (for example Algolia, Klevu, Searchspring, and Doofinder) focus on fast keyword search, autocomplete, and faceted filters so shoppers can narrow a large catalog by attributes like size, color, brand, or price.
When to use it: best for larger catalogs and shoppers who already know roughly what they're looking for and want to type it in or filter their way to it.
Merchandising and recommendation tools (for example Nosto, Rebuy, and Yotpo) power "recommended for you" blocks, related and complementary products, and rules for sorting collections. They surface relevant items the shopper didn't explicitly search for.
When to use it: useful when you want to guide browsing, raise average order value, or highlight products on category, product, and cart pages.
Visual search tools (for example Syte) let shoppers find products by image or by visual similarity, matching a photo or a chosen item to look-alike products in your catalog.
When to use it: a fit for visually driven categories like fashion, furniture, and decor, where appearance matters more than a precise keyword.
A newer category — which BOBBI is part of — uses an AI storefront that asks the shopper what they want and guides them to it through conversation, rather than expecting them to search or filter on their own.
When to use it: well suited to shoppers who are exploring or unsure, or catalogs where the right choice depends on needs that are easier to describe in plain language than to filter for.
BOBBI takes a different approach from traditional point tools. Instead of bolting another widget onto a static storefront, BOBBI adds an intelligent storefront layer: an AI-powered storefront that understands what each visitor wants, guides them to the right product through conversation, and sends them to your native Shopify checkout. It runs in parallel with your existing store — no theme changes, no checkout replacement.
If you want to see the idea in practice, read how it works or try the live demo .
There's no single right tool — the best choice depends on your catalog and your shoppers. A few practical questions to work through:
Product discovery tools help shoppers find the right products in an online store — through search, filtering, recommendations, visual search, or a conversational storefront.
AI product discovery uses intent understanding and conversational or algorithmic recommendations to connect each shopper with relevant products quickly, instead of relying only on manual search and filters.
BOBBI adds an AI-powered intelligent storefront on top of a Shopify catalog that asks what a shopper wants and guides them to the right product, then sends them to the store's native checkout.
They can complement each other. Search serves shoppers who know what they want; a conversational storefront helps those who are exploring or unsure.
Shopify today, with additional platforms on the roadmap.
Product discovery tools fall into a few groups: smarter site search, faceted filtering, recommendation engines, visual search, and merchandising. Each helps shoppers find products faster in a different way. The newest approach is conversational discovery: instead of making shoppers search and filter, a Smart Store like BOBBI asks what they want in natural language and surfaces the right products directly — combining the jobs of search, filtering, and recommendations into one guided experience.
On mobile, manual search and filtering are hard. BOBBI improves discoverability by letting shoppers describe what they want in natural language and surfacing the right products instantly, a conversational alternative to search-and-filter that suits small screens.
BOBBIBOBBI Smart Store is in a closed pioneer phase.
Apply — we onboard new partners in small batches.
Eero