Magento Guide → Product Discovery

Magento product discovery tips and tools

What is Magento product discovery?

Product discovery is how shoppers find, browse, compare, and evaluate products in your Magento store. It includes search, category pages, filters, product recommendations, visual tools, and merchandising content.

Strong product discovery helps shoppers move through your catalog more easily and find relevant products before they leave.

Start with Magento search and catalog basics

Better Magento product discovery starts with the information Magento uses to return, filter, and organize products. Before adding advanced discovery tools, review product data, searchable attributes, synonyms, and search behavior.

Improve product attributes

Product attributes power Magento search, filters, layered navigation, and product comparison. Product names, SKUs, categories, descriptions, sizes, colors, brands, compatibility details, materials, and other key attributes should be complete and consistent.

Apply consistent product attributes: Sizes, colors, brands, and other attributes power effective filtering. Define and group product attributes under Stores > Attributes > Product and assign them to attribute sets.

Avoid making too many attributes searchable. If every field becomes searchable, results can become less useful and search performance can suffer. Focus on attributes shoppers actually use to find products.

Adjust attribute weighting

Give more weight to important fields such as product name, SKU, brand, model number, or product type. This helps Magento return stronger results when shoppers search for exact products, technical identifiers, or brand-specific terms.

For example, a shopper searching by SKU should not have to scroll through loosely related products before finding the exact match.

Manage search terms and synonyms

Search synonyms: Helps match terms like “jeans” with “denim” to reduce dead ends. Set these up in the Magento Admin by going to Marketing > SEO & Search > Search Synonyms and linking common alternatives.

Review common misspellings, alternate product names, and zero-result searches. If shoppers use different language than your product catalog, synonyms and redirects can help them reach the right products faster.

Add autocomplete or instant search

Search-as-you-type: Predictive suggestions appear as users type, speeding up navigation. You can enable this through third-party extensions like Klevu, Luigi’s Box, or Adobe Live Search, which offer JavaScript widgets or API integrations.

Autocomplete can help shoppers move faster, especially when they know what they want. For larger catalogs, instant search tools can also support typo tolerance, product suggestions, and behavior-based ranking.

Improve category structure and navigation

Category structure is important because many shoppers browse before they search. Clear categories help them narrow options without needing the exact product name.

Keep categories easy to scan

Use logical categories: Structure from broad to narrow, e.g., “Women > Dresses > Maxi.” Create and manage categories in Catalog > Categories and assign products via the category tab on each product’s page.

A good category structure should follow how shoppers think, not only how the business organizes inventory internally. Keep category labels clear, avoid unnecessary depth, and make sure shoppers can reach important products without clicking through too many layers.

Use layered navigation carefully

Implement layered navigation: Let users refine product lists with faceted search. Enable layered navigation by assigning filterable attributes to your product listings and enabling them under “Catalog Input Type.”

Filters should help shoppers narrow results, not overwhelm them. Use filters that match real buying decisions, such as price, size, color, brand, compatibility, material, rating, availability, or product type.

Optimize mobile navigation

Product discovery often breaks down on mobile when search, filters, and menus become hard to use. Test mobile search, category menus, product cards, filter drawers, and sorting options.

On smaller screens, shoppers should be able to search, filter, compare, and add to cart without fighting the layout.

Use product recommendations strategically

Recommendations help shoppers find products they may not search for directly. They can support browsing, comparison, bundling, and add-on purchases.

Related products

Related products: Highlight complementary items or alternatives. Set these manually per product in the Magento Admin under the Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells section.

Use related products to show similar items, replacements, accessories, or products that help shoppers compare options.

Up-sells

Use up-sells to guide shoppers toward higher-value products when the recommendation is relevant. This can work well for premium versions, larger sizes, upgraded models, or more complete product options.

Cross-sells

Use cross-sells to suggest add-ons, refills, parts, accessories, or companion products near cart or checkout.

Cross-sells should make the purchase easier, not distract shoppers from completing checkout.

Recently viewed, bestsellers, and trending products

Trending products: Show what’s popular to build urgency and trust. Use rule-based product listings or custom widgets to feature bestsellers, either via Page Builder or a third-party analytics plugin.

Recently viewed products, bestsellers, new arrivals, and trending items help shoppers continue browsing without starting over.

Use content blocks to guide discovery

Product discovery can happen through content, not only search and filters. Buying guides, seasonal collections, shop-the-look sections, comparison pages, and in-blog product callouts can help shoppers understand what to buy and why.

• Shop the look: A style guide block with clickable outfits. Create visual blocks in Magento Page Builder and insert product links using dynamic widgets.
• Buying guides: Explain how to choose between technical products or sizes. Write content in CMS pages or blog modules and embed product carousels using layout updates or shortcodes.
• Seasonal promos: Link homepage banners to curated categories or search results. Build static blocks tied to campaigns, then assign them via Widgets to specific pages or customer groups.
• In-blog merchandising: Embed product sliders into relevant content. Use Magento’s native widget system or Page Builder drag-and-drop features to place product collections inside blog content.

You can implement these using Magento’s CMS Blocks, Page Builder, or layout XML updates. Combine with segmentation to personalize which blocks appear to whom.

Use AI product discovery when native tools aren’t enough

AI product discovery tools can help larger catalogs personalize search results, recommendations, and category merchandising. They can use behavior signals, search intent, product similarity, browsing patterns, purchase history, and session activity to surface better products.

When to use AI product discovery

AI product discovery may be useful when your store has a large catalog, frequent zero-result searches, poor search relevance, low recommendation engagement, heavy manual merchandising work, or shoppers who search with varied language.

Tools like Klevu, Luigi’s Box, and LupaSearch can support typo correction, natural language processing, behavioral ranking, product suggestions, and autocomplete. After choosing a tool, install it through Magento Marketplace or Composer, then configure the API keys and feature settings in the extension’s admin settings.

Keep product data clean

AI tools work better when product names, attributes, categories, filters, images, and descriptions are complete and consistent.

AI can improve discovery, but it doesn’t replace strong product data, useful filters, and clear merchandising rules.

Magento product discovery tools to consider

Klevu

Klevu supports AI search, product recommendations, and category merchandising for Magento stores. It can help stores return more relevant results for long-tail, misspelled, or intent-based searches.

Luigi’s Box

Luigi’s Box supports personalized search, typo correction, autocomplete, filtering, and category merchandising.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach supports semantic search, category page optimization, merchandising rules, personalization, and multilingual search.

LupaSearch

LupaSearch focuses on fast search, relevant results, filters, and machine-learning-supported ranking.

Adobe Live Search

Adobe Live Search is native to Adobe Commerce and uses Adobe Sensei to support smart search and ranking.

The right tool depends on your Magento version, catalog size, search needs, merchandising workflow, budget, and technical support.

Track product discovery performance

• Top search queries: Identify what users are actively looking for. Use Magento’s built-in Reports under Reports > Search Terms, or extract data from GA4 or your AI tool’s dashboard.
• Zero-result searches: Spot missing products or synonym opportunities. Monitor failed search reports from tools like Klevu or Adobe Live Search to refine product data and synonym lists.
• Filter behavior: Understand which attributes matter most. Review product filter usage with Hotjar or filter tracking in analytics platforms like GA4 or Mixpanel.
• Click and scroll heatmaps: See what grabs attention on category and product pages. Add Hotjar, FullStory, or Microsoft Clarity scripts to Magento and view heatmap reports segmented by device or customer group.

You can also review search exit rate, click-through rate from search results, recommendation clicks, product views with low add-to-cart rates, cart progression, and mobile search behavior.

Performance and hosting considerations

Product discovery depends on performance as much as merchandising. Slow search, delayed filters, heavy category pages, broken indexing, or underpowered hosting can hurt discovery even when product data is strong.

Magento stores with larger catalogs may need strong caching, search backend support, indexing, and enough server resources to keep search, category pages, and recommendations responsive.

What to test after product discovery changes

After you change product discovery settings, test the areas shoppers use most:

• Misspellings and synonyms
• Category navigation
• Filters on desktop and mobile
• Product recommendation blocks
• Product pages
• Cart and checkout
• Page speed on category and search results pages

A change that improves product visibility should still support the rest of the shopping experience.

When to ask for support

Ask for support if search results are poor, filters slow down the store, product recommendations do not appear correctly, category pages are slow, indexing fails, or discovery tools create performance issues.

Support can help review hosting resources, search backend configuration, indexing, caching, logs, and Magento performance issues that affect product discovery.

Magento product discovery FAQs

Magento product discovery next steps

Magento product discovery works best when search, categories, filters, product data, recommendations, and performance all support the way shoppers browse.

Start by reviewing zero-result searches and top search queries. Use that data to improve product attributes, synonyms, categories, filters, and recommendation placements.

If slow search, indexing, or category page performance affects product discovery, explore Liquid Web Magento hosting.