Get started with the Coveo app for Shopify

The following items must be configured in your Coveo Platform before installing the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app.

This section briefly references Shopify elements that are needed to use Coveo in your Shopify storefront. Refer to Shopify’s Help Center for full configuration instructions.

Your Shopify store must have:

The home page of the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app has several cards with useful information.

These cards include the following:

The first step is to link your Coveo organization to the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app. This step is mandatory, so you won’t be able to leave the Welcome page and access the app home page or the other steps until you complete it.

After you click Link organization, a Choose organization region modal appears. Select your Coveo organization’s region and click Link organization again.

You’ll be redirected to the Coveo Platform login screen for your region. After you log in, select your Coveo organization from the dropdown menu and click Next. On the following screen, click Authorize to let the app access your organization, and you’ll be redirected to the Link organization step in the app.

The next step is to sync your Shopify product catalog. When you launch a sync, the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app indexes all products and variants that meet the prerequisites in your Coveo organization. It also deploys a web pixel the first time you sync your Shopify product catalog.

Before you launch the sync, consider selecting one or more custom fields to index. If you do, you may also want to select them to use as filters (or facets in the Coveo Platform). You’ll set up your facets in the next step.

Later steps depend on your Shopify product catalog having been synced, and the other pages display a warning if you skip it.

When you sync your Shopify product catalog, the app creates the following resources in your organization:

Once the product catalog is synced, you can sync your Shopify collections using the Collection page in the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app. Bringing your collections into the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH) allows you to add merchandising rules, ranking controls, and AI optimization to the collections, all of which will be reflected in the Shopify storefront. You also gain access to detailed reporting metrics.

The initial collection sync creates a product listing page (PLP) in the CMH for each Shopify collection. Both smart and manual collections are supported by this feature. You can then add rules to the PLPs, which will be reflected in the Shopify storefront.

Subsequent syncs will update the Configuration tab of the collection PLPs with the most recent content from the Shopify collections. Any edits that have been made to the page settings in the CMH will be overwritten by the sync.

Once the Shopify collections have been synced, it’s time to set up your storefront. This step includes the following parts:

Once all the items are synced, make sure that you’re tracking events for analytics reporting and to create AI models. All the Coveo AI models require certain events to be tracked, with the specific events required depending on the model.

In the app, you can view the number of events that were logged over the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 14 days.

For each event type, if any events have been logged for the selected reporting period, the View events button takes you to the Data Health (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page in the Coveo Administration Console. On the Data Health page, the date range will automatically match the period selected in the app.

Add merchandising rules to determine how products are queried and displayed. This step isn’t mandatory, and you can move on to create AI models without setting up any rules.

The buttons on this page take you to the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH) Search manager tool in your Coveo organization, where you can review queries and create or modify rules.

The final step is to create the AI models that will power your storefront’s search interface.

The buttons on this page take you directly to the creation tool for each type of model in the Coveo Administration Console.

Every model has its own set of events that must be tracked, and you can verify that you’ve recorded the necessary events in the collapsible Prerequisites section for each one.

If you uninstall the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app without unlinking your Coveo organization and then reinstall the app within 48 hours (before the Shopify-related resources have been automatically deleted from your organization), your organization will still appear to be linked and your Shopify product catalog will initially appear to be synced.

However, each installation generates new API keys for authenticating with the Coveo Platform. You won’t be able to launch a manual sync or access the Events, Search, or Models pages of the app.

You’ll have to manually unlink and relink your organization to resolve the authentication error and begin using the Coveo AI Search & Discovery app again.