Case Study: iStyles achieves instant, relevant site search and higher conversions with Algolia

Building a better iStyles shopping experience with Algolia search

iStyles is a tech-driven retailer of fashion accessories for consumer electronics, offering over 200,000 products, 1,600 designs and support for 800+ devices. As their catalog and traffic grew, the default e-commerce platform’s rigid search and their own custom search couldn’t deliver fast, relevant results (searches took 2–3 seconds) or provide better ranking, typo tolerance and synonym matching without heavy engineering investment.

iStyles replaced their custom search with Algolia, integrating the JavaScript Search API on the front end and PHP updates on the back end in under a week. Search latency dropped from ~3 seconds to ~0.03 seconds, enabling instant-as-you-type results and fast, dynamic facets; relevance improved through richer indexing and ranking control, which simplified navigation and contributed to higher conversion rates.

iStyles