How We Built AI-Powered Bundle Discovery for Shopify

Thorsten Maus — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:18:12 +0000

If you run a Shopify store with more than a few hundred products, you have probably noticed: your customers search for things your store sells, and get zero results. Or worse — irrelevant results.

"Blue wetsuit for women" returns everything with the word "blue." "Longboard for beginners" returns every longboard regardless of skill level. "Complete surf kit budget $500" returns nothing, because no single product matches that phrase.

This is not a configuration problem. Keyword search fundamentally cannot understand what the customer is asking for.

What We Built

Inops is an AI-powered search layer for Shopify. It sits between your customers and your product catalog, and it understands intent — not just keywords.

Natural language search. Customers type the way they think. "Warm wetsuit for cold water surfing" finds the right products even if your product titles say "4/3mm Full Wetsuit" instead.

Smart bundle discovery. A customer types "complete surf kit budget $500" and gets a curated bundle — surfboard, wetsuit, leash, wax — assembled across categories, with the total respecting their budget. Each item includes a short explanation of why it was selected.

Similar products. Click any product, and the AI surfaces alternatives matched by meaning — not just "customers also bought."

AI reasoning. Every recommendation comes with context. "Selected because it is a beginner-friendly board within your price range" builds trust and speeds up purchase decisions.

Performance

We obsess over speed because slow search kills conversion:

Metric	Industry average	Inops
Single product search	3-8s (with AI)	Under 2s
Bundle discovery	Not available	2-3s (first result in ~1.3s)
Zero-result rate	10-15%	Under 2%

Results stream in real-time as they are found — the customer sees the first result in about a second, with more appearing as processing continues.

How It Works for Merchants

No theme changes. Drop in a lightweight SDK snippet.
Works with any Shopify theme out of the box.
Merchant dashboard with search analytics — see what customers search for, conversion funnels, response times.
Configurable: control how many results to show, which categories to prioritize, bundle budgets.

Try It

We have a live demo running on a surf shop with 200 products. No account needed:

https://shopify-dummy.inops.io

Queries to try:

"complete surf kit budget $500" (bundle with budget)
"blue wetsuit for women" (natural language)
"longboard for beginners" (intent matching)
"kids surfboard under $300" (price filtering)

The bundle intent is detected automatically. Budget is extracted from natural language.

What Is Next

We are working on support for larger catalogs (5,000+ products), customer behavior tracking (hide products already in cart), and deeper Shopify integration.

If you run a Shopify store and search quality matters to your conversion rate, we would love to hear what problems you are running into.