Product discovery, argued from the facts.
Comparisons, merchandising teardowns and field notes for Shopify Plus teams. Every claim cited, every test repeatable.
All posts 71 of 71
Stop Making `/cart.js` Calls
Most Shopify tracking scripts send additional cart requests to determine cart contents. Ours does not. This article explains our approach and why common alternatives are less effective.
How We Evaluate Search Quality at Scale With LLM Judging and IR Metrics
Search is easy to ship, but hard to know when you’ve broken it.
How We Made Drag-and-Drop Sorting Faster with Fractional Weights
Every time a user dragged a product item to a new position in our Layers dashboard, we were re-sorting and renumbering the entire list. For a list of 100 items, that meant touching all 100 records on every single...
Reactivity Without the Re-Render Tax
Customer clicks a variant. React re-renders the whole product card. The image. The reviews. The breadcrumbs. All of it—just to update a price. Your cart drawer re-renders 47 components to change one number from 9 to 10.
The Hidden Failure Modes of Laravel + PgBouncer + PlanetScale
PlanetScale Postgres offers a managed, branch-native database layer for your Postgres nodes. This enables branch-based deployments, global replication, and connection multiplexing. However, it introduces failure...
Using Multiple PgBouncers to Isolate Application and Worker Connections
On February 27, we had a rough afternoon. Multiple waves of automated traffic hit our platform while several merchants were already in busy windows. We’d been mitigating it since mid-morning, but at 1:51 PM, the...
Signal-driven health monitoring for HNSW indices w/ pgvector
Vector search in PostgreSQL has come a long way, and pgvector makes it simple: insert embeddings, create an HNSW index, and run ANN queries. At least for a while.
How Layers Restores Real Merchandising Control Through Smarter Sort Logic
Collection pages guide how shoppers move through a store, yet most brands leave their sort order untouched.
The Definitive Guide to Choosing a Smart Search App for Shopify
Choosing the right smart search app for your Shopify Plus store can make a big difference in your conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and revenue. With so many options out there, it’s important to know your needs, look at key features, and think about future growth. This guide will help you find a smart search solution that improves product discovery and delivers real results for your business.
Achieve Salesforce-Level Merchandising Sophistication on Shopify With Layers
Leaving Salesforce Commerce Cloud for Shopify is a decision more and more brands are making, but this move is not free of pitfalls. It means giving up familiar (and critical) search and merchandising functionalities.
Scaling Real‑Time Discovery: Inside Layers’ PlanetScale Migration
Layers is the only Search and Merchandising platform built exclusively for Shopify Plus. Our next-gen platform serves enterprise-level Shopify Plus users with large catalogs, at a fraction of the cost of competing tools. Layers currently powers hundreds of millions of dynamic requests daily (and growing quickly!).