Discovery and personalization

Discovery

Discovery lets shoppers describe what they want in their own words, for example white trail shoes under $200, and shows matching products. It appears in the Discovery field section and in the Ask button of the floating controls.

Discovery field on the Mars demo store

Settings

In Theme settings › Discovery:

Setting	What it does
Conversational discovery	Disabled, Discovery only or Conversational.
Provider	Built-in catalog search or App or app proxy endpoint.
Endpoint path	For an endpoint provider: a path on your own store, usually an app proxy, such as `/apps/finder`.
Prompt suggestions	Example requests shown as buttons. One per line.

The built-in catalog search

Works in every store without an app. It reads your catalog (up to 500 products) and understands:

price limits: under $150, over 80, between 50 and 120;
sizes: size 43, in a 10.5;
colors and product words, and words to leave out: not too bright, without laces;
new, latest or this week for new products, and sale or deal for discounted ones.

Using your own endpoint

Choose App or app proxy endpoint and enter a path that starts with /. The theme sends a POST request with a JSON body:

{
  "action": "discover",
  "query": "white trail shoes under $200",
  "context": {
    "template": "index",
    "product": null,
    "collection": null,
    "recent": ["tempo-one"],
    "locale": "en",
    "currency": "USD"
  }
}

action is one of discover, search, recommend, refine (with current, the handles shown now) or explain (with handle). Respond with JSON:

{ "message": "Three pairs under $200.", "handles": ["tempo-one", "ridge-gtx"] }

handles can also be a list of objects with a handle field under products. The theme renders the products itself.

Note

Only non-personal page context is sent: the template, the current product or collection handle, up to five recently viewed product handles, the language and the currency. No customer data is sent by the theme.

Personalization

In Theme settings › Personalization:

Setting	What it does
Returning shoppers	Basic remembers recently viewed products in the shopper’s browser. Advanced adds recommendations and, for signed-in customers, buy again.
Remember recently viewed products	Needed for recently viewed products in Your world and in the footer.

Recently viewed products are stored only in the shopper’s browser and never shown to anyone else.