Let’s start with the obvious: Shopify is exploding.
What began as a platform for ambitious D2C brands has grown into a global operating system for commerce. Its growth has been fast, formidable, and, for many enterprise merchants, limiting. Because as their needs scale, so does the complexity under the hood. And that’s where most discovery platforms fall short.
We built the Fredhopper Product Discovery Shopify App to bridge that gap - for developers, partners, and ambitious merchants alike.
The Problem We Saw
For years, Fredhopper has powered personalized search and merchandising for some of the world's biggest ecommerce brands. But as more of those brands moved (or were born) on Shopify, a consistent pattern emerged:
- They wanted Fredhopper’s full capabilities.
- They didn’t want to write brittle middleware to get there.
- Their agencies were tired of building one-off integrations.
- Data syncing across products, variants, languages, and markets was painful.
- And frontend developers were left reinventing the wheel to build out search and PLP templates.
In short, if you wanted to use Fredhopper on Shopify, you needed time, budget, and a strong stomach.
So we fixed it.
What We Built
The Fredhopper Product Discovery Shopify App is a native integration that connects Shopify storefronts to the Fredhopper Product Discovery platform - no custom plumbing required.
It’s made up of two key components:
- Frontend SDK + Widgets: Add Fredhopper-powered search and PLPs to your storefront with drop-in Theme App Blocks or use our JavaScript SDK to build custom blocks. Whether you’re building with Liquid or using the Theme App Blocks, you can now pull in Fredhopper’s Query API securely and efficiently using Shopify’s App Proxy.
- Data Sync Engine: Sync your full catalog (with support for metafields, variants, markets and locales) to Fredhopper using Shopify’s Bulk Query API — or stream updates in real-time with webhooks and our Streaming API. All managed in a sleek admin UI, right inside the Shopify Admin.
Oh - and we also handle:
- Schema mapping (with versioning)
- Multi-market pricing, localization and markets
- Fallback rendering if Fredhopper is unreachable
- Error notifications, observability, and retry logic
- GDPR cleanup on uninstall
Why This Matters
For Shopify Partners and implementation agencies, this means you can now offer Fredhopper integration as part of your standard toolkit, no bespoke dev cycles, no duct tape. Want to go deeper with personalization, regional merchandising, or dynamic recommendations? It’s all accessible, fast, and manageable through the app.
For technical teams inside Shopify merchants, it means faster time to value. Your storefront gets smarter - search results get sharper, merchandising more adaptive, and product discovery becomes a revenue lever, not a UX bottleneck.
For our existing Fredhopper customers, it’s a way to move from API access to native integration, without giving up any of the power under the hood.
Built for Real-World Teams
This isn’t a side project. It’s a core part of our strategy.
We’ve designed this app to feel like a natural extension of the Shopify Admin, built using Polaris and respecting Shopify’s accessibility and privacy standards. Under the hood, it uses Gadget.dev for backend orchestration, AWS Lambda for our proxy service, and a tight feedback loop between the sync engine and the Fredhopper APIs.
The aim? Less friction. More discovery. And a clear path for growth.
So, What’s Next?
The Fredhopper Product Discovery Shopify App is now live on the Shopify App Store, with early adopters already live.
If you’re a Shopify partner, merchant, or technologist wondering how to bridge the gap between sophisticated product discovery and Shopify’s growing footprint, this is for you.
Want help getting started? Our team is standing by.
And if you’re already building on it, we’d love your feedback.
Paul Taylor - VP, Solutions at Crownpeak