Best Practices

This article details the best ways of using Search to increase your conversion rate significantly. They are based on our 10+ years of eCommerce experience, across thousands of stores.

Choose Layouts #

Site search is one of the highest-intent actions a visitor can take. Research consistently shows that site searchers convert at 2–3 times the rate of visitors who browse through categories.

While they represent roughly 30% of all visitors, they generate 40–60% of total eCommerce revenue. Whichever layout you choose, making search fast, visible, and easy to use is one of the highest-return investments you can make in your webshop.

Clerk offers 3 distinctive layouts for showing search results. We recommend one of two approaches:

• An Omnisearch which combines instant results, facets, categories, and content into a single overlay.
• An Instant Search and Search Page together as two separate components.

Omnisearch is our primary recommendation for most webshops today. It delivers the fastest, most complete search experience out of the box — and for most stores, it is the layout that converts best.

Search comes bundled with great default designs for each layout that already follows our Best Practices.

Omnisearch #

This combines the concepts of an Instant Search and Search Page with Facets into one full-screen overlay. The moment a visitor clicks the search field — before they have typed a single character — Omnisearch opens and presents a window into the entire webshop.

As they type, everything refines in real time: products, categories, content pages, and suggestions all update together.

Imagine a dad who has been sent to buy “the thing my daughter needs for gymnastics” — and he has no idea what that means. He types “gymnastics” into the search field, and before he finishes typing, Omnisearch opens with leotards, training grips, gymnastics shoes, and chalk bags front and centre.

There is also a blog post on beginner gymnastics equipment and a category called “Girls Sport.” He reads the article, picks up everything his daughter needs, and adds a foam roller he read about on the way through.

He still does not know what half the things are called — but he bought them all in under three minutes, without clicking a single menu. That is the experience Omnisearch creates for every visitor.

A great Omnisearch design consists of:

• Your most relevant Facets.
• 40-60 products at a time
• Clear product images, names and prices
• Matching categories
• Matching content pages
• Search suggestions based on the current query
• A “See more results” button loading more products

If you prefer splitting search into a quick Instant Search dropdown for immediate results and a dedicated Search Page for deeper browsing, you can use the following approach instead.

Instant Search #

With decreasing online attention spans, presenting your catalog as soon as visitors start typing significantly impacts their engagement. Up to 60% of visitors find and purchase items directly from this dropdown.

The reason it works so well is simple: it predicts what the visitor is looking for and starts showing results after just the first few characters.

Think of a customer in a rush to buy an American football helmet before practice. The moment they start typing, they can already see that you have dozens of helmets in stock — and they can even browse sizing guides from your content pages without ever leaving the dropdown.

That kind of instant reassurance is what turns a browsing visit into a purchase.

A great Instant Search design consists of:

• A list format that provides overview of results.
• 70% space for products and 30% for other content.
• Product images, names, prices and a call-to-action.
• Search suggestions showing similar queries.
• Matching categories.
• Matching content like blog posts and CMS pages.
• A “See more results” button that links to the Search Page.

Search Page #

This complements the Instant Search Dropdown by facilitating easy browsing of your entire catalog.

Where the Instant Search dropdown is built for speed, the Search Page is built for deliberate exploration. These are two different shopping modes, and both matter.

Some visitors know exactly what they want and need the fastest possible path to it. Others arrive in research mode — they have a rough idea, they want to compare options, and they are not in a rush.

Consider a parent tasked with buying a birthday present for a child who “likes science stuff.” The dropdown shows a few good matches immediately. They click “see all results” and the Search Page opens with 60 or more products.

They filter by age range, set a budget of 60 euros, and narrow it down to chemistry kits. Within a few minutes they have found the perfect option — a product they never would have spotted if they had just grabbed the first dropdown result.

The Search Page is not where visitors go to grab something quickly. It is where they go to find the right thing.

A great Search Page design consists of:

• A grid format that shows products in detail.
• 40-60 products shown at a time.
• Product images, names, prices and a call-to-action.
• Your most relevant Facets.
• A “See more results” button loading more products.

Facets #

Whether you use a Search Page or Omnisearch, Facets is an integral part of making it easy for visitors to browse. Facets let customers mix and match product attributes — price, color, size, brand — in seconds.

Consider a visitor on a budget who needs a helmet priced below 400 euros and only wants it in metallic silver. Without facets, they are scrolling through hundreds of results. With two clicks on the right filters, the right products are right there.

That speed directly translates into fewer drop-offs and more orders. Research shows that shoppers who use filters view 3 times more products than those who do not — and convert at significantly higher rates.

Despite this, only 16% of eCommerce sites offer an effective faceted search experience, which means getting this right is a genuine competitive advantage.

We recommend showing at least these Facets:

• Price
• Categories
• Brand/vendor

Any other relevant attributes related to your business should also be included. This can be colors, sizes, technical specifications, weight and any other data you have available.

Clerk’s facets adapt automatically to each search, so they only show filters that are meaningful for the current results — shoe sizes appear when browsing footwear, wattage appears when browsing power tools, and thread count appears when browsing bed linen. None of those filters would make any sense the other way around.

Streamline Designs #

Search should fit snugly into your existing webshop design, and it should be easy for visitors to find and interact with it.

Branding #

Regardless of the layouts you choose, they should follow your brand style to become an integrated part of your site. Default designs can be tailored using either our Design Editor, or with code designs.

In most cases, it is possible to make Clerk’s product cards look exactly like the product cards on the rest of your webshop. As long as you sync the attributes your cards rely on — colours, sizes, badges, labels, or anything else displayed on the card — the design can be matched precisely.

The remaining work is mostly about ensuring that facets, headlines, fonts, and spacing align with your existing style.

You do not need to do this manually. There are two AI-assisted ways to get help:

• Ask Clerk.io is a dedicated AI assistant that can handle virtually anything on your store — including replicating your existing design and pushing it directly into your Clerk setup.
• The AI Design Editor is built into the code design editor in my.clerk.io. It lets you describe the changes you want in plain language and applies them to the code in real time, making it easy to iterate visually without leaving the editor.

Both options remove the need to write code yourself — Ask Clerk.io is the broader tool, while the AI Design Editor is purpose-built for design work and lets you see changes as they happen.

The most important elements to streamline are:

• Font family
• Font size
• Font color
• Button color

Search Field #

A critical aspect of search functionality is making the search field visibly accessible at all times. Having a great search function makes no difference if your visitors can’t find it.

Studies show that 43% of retail customers go directly to the search bar when they land on a webshop — making it one of the first things they look for.

Many webshops hide the search field behind small icons or collapse it into a menu — a habit formed when search was poor and best kept out of sight. When your search is genuinely good, hiding it is the last thing you want to do.

Think of it this way: if you hired a top sales expert, you would not put her in the back of the store stacking shelves. She should be out front, talking to customers. Your search field is your best sales tool — treat it accordingly.

• Position it clearly in the top menu on all devices, ideally in the middle or to the right.
• It should take up 25–50% of the menu’s width to attract attention. Amazon’s header is roughly half search field, half everything else — and that is not an accident.
• Include a good placeholder text like “Search among 4000+ products and pages”

Optimize Regularly #

Clerk’s AI keeps search results up-to-date based on customer behaviour at all times, but there will be cases where a human touch is needed to take your results to the next level.

Analytics #

This dashboard helps you identify searches you can actively improve, such as searches for unavailable products or unexpected synonyms.

On average, 12–24% of all on-site searches return zero results across eCommerce stores — and 68% of customers say they would not return to a site after a poor search experience. Every search you fix is customers you keep.

Customers often search in ways you would never anticipate. Maybe they search for “body pillow” when they actually mean “shoulder pads.” A quick synonym in the Clerk admin resolves this in seconds and starts converting those searches immediately.

The same logic applies to everyday language differences. If your product catalog uses “pants” throughout but customers consistently search for “trousers,” every one of those searches returns weaker results than it should. Adding the synonym fixes it for everyone.

There is also a broader discoverability benefit worth noting: the way customers search on your site is the same way they search externally — on Google, but increasingly also through AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

When someone asks an AI to recommend a product, it draws on the same language your customers use. Every synonym or search pattern you discover here is a signal about how to improve your own product texts and content so you are found more easily, regardless of where the search happens.

The dashboard also surfaces product gaps and pricing issues. If customers consistently search for a product and no revenue comes from those searches, it may mean the item is out of stock, not yet in your catalogue, or priced above what the market expects.

Seeing that nobody converts on “Han Solo figure” is a clear signal to get that product back in stock. And if you run a Star Wars store and customers are searching for “Star Trek” — yes, that happens, and no, we will not judge — adding a synonym that gently redirects them to the right galaxy is a perfectly valid business decision.

Reviewing this dashboard regularly allows you to find the best places to spend your time, when you want to optimise results even further. We recommend checking it at least once a month as part of your regular business analysis.

Why AI Ranking Matters #

A common misconception is that search quality is mainly about finding the right products. In practice, the order in which results are shown matters just as much.

A text-based search ranks products by how many times the search term appears in the product name or description. That sounds logical — but it means a product with “Adidas” written twice in its title appears above one that is the actual bestseller, even if it has never sold a single unit.

Clerk’s AI ranks results by likelihood to convert: what is each visitor most likely to actually buy, given what the store knows about their behaviour and what similar customers have purchased?

A store with 58 Adidas products will show the gloves at the top not because the word “Adidas” appears most often, but because gloves are what customers in that context are most likely to want. That is the difference between a search that looks smart and one that actually performs.

This distinction matters especially in eCommerce. Text-based ranking might be perfectly adequate for a content site or a knowledge base, where the goal is to surface the most relevant article.

But in eCommerce, the goal is conversion — and that means ranking results by what customers are actually going to click and buy, not by how many times a keyword appears in a product title. Showing the right product first is not just a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a sale and a bounce.

Merchandising #

When you have specific marketing goals, like promoting your own whitelabel products or clearing your inventory of low-stock items, use Merchandising to quickly influence your Search results.

A strong starting point is syncing the margin of each product and then boosting everything you earn the most from selling. Clerk’s AI still ensures the right products are shown to each visitor — it simply gives added priority to your higher-margin items. It is one of the most direct ways to increase profit without changing anything about how customers search.

Consider a sports store that sells both branded helmets from major manufacturers and its own whitelabel helmet at a significantly higher margin. Both products are good — but when a customer searches for “football helmet,” the AI would naturally surface the most popular branded options first.

With a simple merchandising campaign, the store can nudge the whitelabel option higher in the results without overriding relevance entirely. The customer still sees great options. The store just earns more from whoever clicks first.

The same logic applies to clearing inventory. If you are overstocked on a specific item, a short-term boost campaign can increase its visibility across all relevant searches until stock is back in balance — without touching prices or running a sale.

It takes less than 5 minutes to set up campaigns that tell Clerk to focus on the products that matter most to you right now.