Case study
Web-to-Print Firm Boosts Search with Elastic App Search
A web-to-print company replaced a missing product-search experience with relevancy-ranked Elastic App Search, running on a new Elasticsearch instance on Elastic Cloud.
A tech-enabled web-to-print company built its business on letting customers design, customize, and order printed products entirely online.
It serves B2C and B2B customers globally across signage, apparel, and personalized decor on its own ordering platform — so as the catalog grew, search needed to help people find what they wanted, not just browse past it.
Discovery to working prototype, before go-live. Relevancy-ranked product search live on the website for the first time. Marketing gained direct control over search ranking and product promotion.
Key servicesHow SquareShift delivered it.
The challenge
The client had no product search built into its website. Customers browsing a large catalog of custom signage, apparel, and personalized decor had no way to search for what they wanted, and when results did surface, they weren’t relevant. The in-house team also had no expertise to configure or run an autocomplete experience.
That gap reached past the storefront. The marketing team had no lever to shape what search surfaced — no way to weight results by sales volume or actively promote specific products through search.
What we delivered
SquareShift stood up a new Elasticsearch instance on Elastic Cloud and configured and deployed Elastic App Search on top of it. Before committing to production, the team ran a two-week discovery and proof-of-concept phase to confirm App Search was the right fit for the client’s catalog and traffic.
From there, SquareShift built out App Search’s ranking and autocomplete capabilities, tuned relevancy so results reflected sales volume and product priority, and used App Search’s analytics to keep improving the experience after launch. Training and post-implementation support handed the client’s LiveOps team the skills to run Elastic Cloud and App Search on its own.
The payoff
The website now runs relevancy-ranked product search with autocomplete where none existed before, and the new experience improved conversion directly. Marketing can promote products and weight ranking by sales volume without opening an engineering ticket, and the LiveOps team manages Elastic Cloud and App Search independently day to day.
The win in a search rebuild isn't the search box — it's handing ranking control to the business, so marketing can weight results by sales volume without an engineering ticket.
Platform & Software Engineering Practice Lead, SquareShift
Where this work sits