Visual Navigation Suggestions

What it solves

Text-only autocomplete works well for shoppers who know exactly what they want to type. But many shoppers browse visually — they're looking for inspiration or exploring a category, not formulating a precise query. Visual Navigation Suggestions extend the search experience with image-driven suggestions that guide shoppers toward categories and products they might not have thought to search for directly.

When to use it

• Category-led browsing experiences — surface visual category tiles alongside text suggestions to catch shoppers who are browsing, not searching
• Promotional surfaces — highlight specific categories or product sets with imagery during campaigns
• Reducing zero-result searches — guide shoppers toward well-served categories before they type a query that returns nothing

Key concepts

Visual suggestion — a combination of an image, a label, and a destination (usually a category or search query) that appears in the suggestion panel as a shopper types or focuses the search bar.

Trigger — the query prefix or context that causes a visual suggestion to appear. A suggestion can be configured to appear for specific query prefixes or as a default set when the search bar is first focused.

Destination — where the shopper lands when they click a visual suggestion. This can be a category page, a pre-filtered search results page, or any URL in the storefront.

How it works

Open Product Discovery → Visual Navigation from the left sidebar. Each row represents a configured visual suggestion, showing the image, label, trigger, and destination.

To add a new suggestion, click + New and configure the image, label, trigger, and destination. Suggestions can be ordered manually to control which appears first when multiple suggestions match the same trigger.

Related pages

• Autocomplete — text-based query suggestions that appear alongside visual navigation
• Product Discovery — overview of all discovery tools