Say you’re at a clothing store. You know exactly what you want to buy but have to go through the store’s entire catalog to find the product. Sounds like a pointless hassle, right?
Now imagine you had a salesperson to assist you. They’d ask you a few questions – What are you looking for? What’s your budget? What size and color do you want? – and voila, you’ll get just what you wanted.
This is exactly what a product search feature on your store can do for your customers.
Product search allows customers to find items they’re looking for faster, improving their experience at your store and increasing the chances of a sale.
Now, if you have a small WooCommerce store with a handful of products, navigating your website and finding products will be fairly easy.
But if you offer a wide variety of products spread across categories, product search becomes an essential feature.
Given its importance, WooCommerce comes with a default search form, which is great for getting started with this feature on your store. However, this form offers only basic features, letting customers search for products mainly by their names.
For more advanced features – like live search, autocorrection, and providing more relevant results – Woo Product Search plugins can prove to be helpful.
We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of some of the best WooCommerce Product Search plugins that can enhance your customers’ shopping experience. Let’s explore them!
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is an excellent plugin to add a product search to your store – it’s feature-packed and works in a super smooth fashion.
The plugin adds a predictive search engine on your website, showing results as users type – in real-time, without loading other pages. And not just product names, it also lets customers search through categories, excerpts, tags, and stock-keeping units (SKU).
What’s more, customers can also filter their search and choose the product or category they want the search to run on.
You can choose the size and width of the search form, set the maximum number of products that will show up in the suggestions, and even exclude out-of-stock products from the search.
Besides product names, you can even show their images, prices, and descriptions in the search results for better usability and customer experience.
Top feature: It also lets you show a customizable “Sale” badge and highlight promotions on products shown in the search results.
Pricing: $69.99/year with 1 year’s updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
WooCommerce Product Search
WooCommerce Product Search is a great extension to add a search feature to your store and help customers find products quickly.
It adds a live search field on your website, showing product suggestions to customers as they type and providing them a smooth experience.
Besides the name, you can also show the product image, price, and description in these results.
Customers can click on a product to be directed to its page. But what’s even more helpful is that the plugin also lets you show an “Add to Cart” button with every product, so they can directly add products to their cart.
Its live filters (updated based on the search query) also allow customers to search by category, price, color, size, sale, and more and fine-tune their results.
The best part is that the plugin automatically indexes all your products to keep the search results up to date.
Top feature: It gives you rich statistics on what visitors search for in your store. This can help you understand their demands and optimize your store’s catalog accordingly.
Pricing: $49/year with 1 year’s updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
FiboSearch (Ajax Search for WooCommerce)
Another fantastic plugin, FiboSearch adds a product search bar to your store, helping you enhance the overall customer experience and improve your offerings.
Its search field offers live suggestions, and users can look up products by their title, descriptions, and SKU.
You can choose to show extra product data like images and prices in the search results. But that’s not it – it also lets you add a “Details Panel,” which appears as users hover over a product. Besides additional information and a larger image, this panel includes an add-to-cart button with a quantity field – to help speed up purchase decisions.
Interestingly, the plugin even comes with a “Fuzzy Search” feature that shows relevant results even when customers mistype in the search bar. Its search and suggestions fields are both mobile-friendly.
Top feature: It offers Google Analytics support, helping you understand which searches showed results and didn’t. This way, you can analyze your customer’s demands and whether your store meets them, and even see which products are the most-searched.
Pricing: Offers a free version; Pro plans start at $49/year.
Advanced Woo Search
Advanced Woo Search is a straightforward plugin offering all the features you’d need to implement a product search functionality on your store.
It lets your customers search what they’re looking for across all your products – you can allow them to run searches based on product name, description, attributes, categories, and more.
You can customize the search form and results’ layouts and choose what details to show in the latter – like the product title, category, image, price, stock status, ratings, and sale badge. It also lets you include an add-to-cart button for each product within the results.
It too offers Google Analytics support so you can track your searches. And what’s even more interesting is that it lets you specify the stock status products must have for them to be displayed in the search results.
Top feature: It automatically syncs all your products, so you don’t have to re-index every time you update your catalog.
Pricing: Offers a free version; Pro plans start at $59/year.
Premmerce Product Search for WooCommerce
Premmerce Product Search offers many features to help customers find what they’re looking for in your store.
It lets your customers search for products by their name, description, or SKU. You can fix the minimum number of characters a user must enter for the live search to start working and the maximum number of results to display in the suggestions.
You can also hide out-of-stock items from the search, choose what fields to show in the results (like the product image and price), and add an add-to-cart option alongside each product.
The best part about the plugin is that it starts working automatically after activation – all you have to do is index your products.
Top feature: It auto-corrects input errors. So, if a user enters a term incorrectly, instead of showing “No Results Found,” it searches for similar words or those with similar pronunciation and brings them the closest and most relevant results.
Pricing: Offers a free version; paid plans start at $49.99/year.
WooCommerce Search, Filters & Merchandising
Fast Simon’s WooCommerce Product Search is a powerful plugin that adds a live search bar with autocomplete suggestions on your store.
It offers many exciting features – like search results sorting (so users can sort products by price, popularity, newest arrivals, etc.) and Did-You-Mean (that autocorrects what users typed to show relevant results). Its search filters are also useful, helping customers narrow down results based on category, price, and other smart filters generated based on the query.
Besides product thumbnails, price, and descriptions, you can also choose to show product reviews, quick view, and add-to-cart buttons in the search results.
Its search fields are also mobile-optimized, giving your customers a fast and hassle-free experience no matter which device they’re using.
Top feature: The plugin offers deep search analytics that helps you understand what customers search for the most on your store, what they find and don’t, and the revenue earned from searches.
Pricing: Offers a basic free plan; paid plans start from $29.99/month (billed annually).
Smart WooCommerce Search
Used by top brands, Smart WooCommerce Search is a super-fast plugin that not only adds a search engine but also filters in your store – to help customers find exactly what they want.
It lets customers search by product name and even attributes and SKU. Its search functionality is predictive, too, showing results as users type. And, it also autocorrects typos to show results closest to what they entered.
Again, you can customize the product preview shown in the search results by choosing what to display – product name, image, price, stock status. You can even highlight product offers here to attract customers and show a “View Product” or “Add to Cart” button.
What’s more, the plugin offers real-time indexation, tracking all changes and syncing new products within minutes of adding them to your catalog.
It too offers analytics to help you understand the most-searched terms and whether they generated results.
Top feature: It lets you customize the search widget’s colors to suit your store’s theme. You can also enable the feature on mobiles.
Pricing: Based on the number of products in your store. It’s free for up to 25 products.
Conclusion
By helping users find products quickly and without hassle, product search can enhance your customers’ shopping experience. The better the user experience, the higher the chances of making a sale.
These seven plugins are some of the best there are when it comes to adding advanced search functionality to your store and, by extension, for increasing sales.
All of them offer many more exciting features that can add to your customers’ shopping experience, encouraging more sales and allowing you to bag more repeat purchases – so make sure to research them further before you make a pick. Good luck!