When we launched the first version of Inops, our AI-powered search app for Shopify, we tested it against store catalogs in the hundreds of products. That works fine for small shops. But the merchants who need better search the most — the ones running 2,000, 5,000, or more SKUs — were hitting walls.
V1.6 is our answer to that. Here's what changed.
Testing Against Real Scale
We spent the past few weeks running Inops against a catalog modelled on Fashion Nova's product data — roughly 5,000 products across dozens of categories. Fashion Nova is one of the most product-dense fast-fashion retailers on Shopify, so it felt like the right benchmark.
What we found: most of the early assumptions we made about performance held up well, but a few things needed rethinking. Specifically, how long merchants had to wait during product sync, and whether the AI layer could stay responsive under that kind of load.
Search Performance at 5K Products
With a 5,000-product catalog, a linear search query like "black skinny jeans mens" now returns results in around 2.6 seconds on average. That includes semantic understanding — it's not just keyword matching. The AI reads intent and returns ranked, relevant results.
Bundle discovery is actually faster. When a shopper types something like "casual mens outfit under $100", the first bundle suggestion comes back in roughly 1.4 seconds. That's because bundle discovery is optimised around grouping and scoring patterns, not exhaustive catalog sweeps.
Neither of those numbers are final — we're still tuning — but they represent a meaningful step up from where we were, and they were measured against real product data at real scale.
Products Sync in the Background
Previously, when a merchant connected Inops and started a product sync, the app would sit there processing. For a 5,000-product store, that became a timeout waiting to happen.
In v1.6, product sync runs in the background. A merchant connects their store, clicks sync, and can immediately go back to running their business. The products index quietly in the background, and the search experience comes online once it's ready. We tested the full 5,000-product sync without a single timeout.
For merchants with large catalogs, this was probably the most noticeable friction point. It's gone now.
Automatic AI Provider Recovery
Inops uses multiple AI providers to handle different parts of the search pipeline — query understanding, reranking, summarisation. Those providers are reliable, but they're not infallible. During peak hours, any cloud AI service can hit capacity limits.
In v1.6, if one provider becomes temporarily unavailable, Inops automatically switches to an alternative and continues without interruption. Merchants never see a broken search page or an error message. The switch happens invisibly, mid-request if needed.
This was one of those features that doesn't show up in a demo but matters a lot in production. We've seen it kick in a handful of times during our own testing, and every time, search kept working.
Shopify Compliance: Expiring Access Tokens
Shopify rolled out a new requirement in April 2026: access tokens now expire on a schedule, and apps need to handle refresh cycles properly or lose connectivity.
V1.6 adds full support for this. Token refresh is handled automatically, so merchants don't lose their connection mid-session and don't need to re-authorise the app. This isn't a feature so much as a maintenance requirement — but it's the kind of thing that breaks apps silently if you don't handle it, so it was worth calling out.
What's Next
We're continuing to tune search relevance, especially for merchants who sell in categories where terminology varies a lot (fashion is a good example — "trousers", "pants", and "slacks" should all find the same thing, and increasingly they do).
Bundle discovery is also getting more attention. The 1.4-second initial return time is promising, but we want the full bundle set to load faster too, and we're working on smarter pre-scoring to make that happen.
Try Inops on Your Shopify Store
If you're running a Shopify store with a growing catalog and you've been putting up with search that returns irrelevant results, too many zero-result pages, or no bundle discovery at all — Inops is worth a look.
The free plan covers small catalogs. Larger plans scale with your product count, and the setup takes about five minutes.
Install Inops on the Shopify App Store
Questions or feedback? Drop them in the comments — we read everything.
Top comments (0)