Visual product discovery alongside Apache Solr
Apache Solr is search infrastructure: every shopper-facing feature has to be designed, built and maintained by your team. RecoMelon is enterprise visual discovery for large Shopify catalogues - before and after the purchase - that goes live within hours, configured remotely by our team, so you can see it side by side with your current setup before you commit.
Search that understands what shoppers mean. Conversational and contextual search interprets style, colour, attributes and intent. Dynamic merchandising balances commercial and catalogue priorities, while inline Shop Similar and integrated LiveGrid™ UGC keep shoppers discovering without returning to a static results grid.
Shop Similar, directly from the product image. When a product is "almost right", Reveal™ offers visually aligned alternatives from within the primary product image, above the fold. Shoppers stay on the PDP and keep their intent while finding an alternative without the attribute stopping the purchase.
Turn “almost right” into another relevant option. Shop Similar keeps high-intent shoppers exploring with visually matched alternatives based on the product they are already considering - helping them refine their choice without starting their search again.
Turn one product into a complete look. Complementary recommendations create multiple looks around a chosen product, with configurable discounts and multi-buy offers to increase AOV. Bundle Rescue swaps unavailable or unsuitable items for visually similar alternatives without breaking the set. Integrated LiveGrid™ content helps shoppers visualise the combination.
Abandoned Cart Email Rescue. Sending shoppers back to rejected products repeats the problem. SecondLook™ restores the abandoned basket and offers visually matched alternatives for each item - helping shoppers find a better fit while preserving basket intent and cross-sell opportunities.
The discovery problem
A Solr-backed storefront can retrieve the right product family. It does not, by itself, show a shopper a version with the right cut or colour, rebuild a bundle when an item sells out, or turn a retired URL into a shoppable page.
Each of those is a separate engineering project. Until they ship, the store keeps losing shoppers at exactly those moments.
Fit and implementation
Fit and implementation
VisualDNA™ can support Shop Similar or Reveal™ alternatives on selected PDPs. Bundles™ addresses complementary choices around an item already under consideration. These are commerce journeys to test, not claims that RecoMelon reproduces a custom Solr configuration.
Fit and implementation
Retain ownership of the Solr index and existing retrieval work.
Fit and implementation
Agree catalogue inputs, update freshness, rendering, analytics and fallbacks for the selected surface. No native Solr connector is assumed.
Fit and implementation
Use pattern and colour alternatives to evaluate visual relationships alongside the existing search setup.
Fit and implementation
Review a coordinated room selection as a separate discovery surface, with clear ownership of catalogue facts and placements.
Why enterprise teams choose RecoMelon
Built for large catalogues - up to 2 million SKUs on Enterprise - with the same engine on Starter and Growth for smaller merchants. With Apache Solr, each of the eight shopper-journey moments is a custom build; RecoMelon covers all eight natively. VisualDNA™ matches on cut, silhouette, colour, print and structure, and explains each match.
Enterprise teams we speak to typically plan 6 weeks to 3 months to take a discovery platform live. RecoMelon installs from the Shopify App Store and our team configures it remotely - hands-free for your developers and merchandisers - so it goes live within hours. With Solr, each feature is designed, built, hosted and maintained by your team.
Brand Kit™ carries your typography, colours, buttons and spacing across every RecoMelon surface, and ThemeFlex™ fits Shopify 2.0 blocks and custom themes without a rebuild. Solr has no storefront components; your team builds the front end.
ColdStart™ and IntentWeave™ give new and long-tail products matches and attributes from their images as soon as they are published, with no sales history or manual tagging. On Solr, cold-start handling is a custom build.
Then prove it side by side. Run RecoMelon next to your Apache Solr stack on the same product pages or categories, measure against your current baseline, and let the results make the case.
RecoMelon is enterprise visual discovery for large Shopify catalogues, live within hours and also available to smaller merchants. It covers all eight shopper-journey moments in the table below natively - before the purchase and around the basket. With Apache Solr, every one of them is a custom build: Solr stores vectors, but image embeddings, recommendation logic, filters and interfaces sit outside it. RecoMelon ships them inside your Shopify theme, so engineering time goes elsewhere.
| Capability | | Apache Solr |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Enterprise visual discovery for large Shopify catalogues, before and after the purchase - also available to smaller merchants | Open-source search server that engineering teams host and build on |
| Before the purchase: discovery and decision | ||
| Conversational and contextual search | Yes - The Index™ reads natural-language requests ("a neutral summer dress with sleeves") against what products look like, with inline Shop Similar | Partial - experimental LLM query parser |
| Visually similar alternatives on the product page | Yes - Shop Similar gallery and Reveal™ on the main product image, matched by VisualDNA™ on cut, colour, pattern and finish | Custom build - embeddings generated outside Solr |
| Shopper refinement inside recommendations | Yes - Dealbreaker™ Filters let shoppers rule out a sleeve, neckline, fit or colour in the panel | Custom build |
| Shoppable UGC and video | Yes - LiveGrid™ links UGC and video to exact products and visual alternatives | Custom build |
| Around the basket and after: order value and recovery | ||
| Create the look bundles and multi-buy | Yes - Bundles™ builds several complementary looks around one product, with multi-buy and discount strategies | Custom build |
| Bundle Rescue | Yes - swaps an unavailable or unsuitable item for a visual match without breaking the set | Custom build |
| Abandoned-cart email alternatives | Yes - SecondLook™ restores the basket and adds visually matched alternatives per item | Custom build |
| 404 and unavailable product recovery | Yes - RescueGrid™ turns dead product URLs into visually similar, in-stock alternatives | Custom build |
| Enterprise deployment | ||
| New products on day one | Yes - ColdStart™ and IntentWeave™ build matches and attributes from product imagery, with no sales history or manual tagging | Custom build |
| Time to go live on Shopify | Within hours: Shopify App Store install, then configured remotely by the RecoMelon team - no tagging project or developer sprint | Self-hosted; developer build |
| Design fit with your theme | Brand Kit™, ThemeFlex™ and LayoutLab match your typography, colours and layouts without a rebuild | Front end built by your team |
| Pricing and trial | Public: Starter $179/mo, Growth $349/mo, Enterprise custom - $1 per day for 30 days | Free open source, plus hosting and engineering |
Solr is the better fit if you have a search engineering team and need full control of an open-source stack. RecoMelon is the better fit if the goal is shopper outcomes this quarter - visual alternatives, complete looks, cart and 404 recovery - without building and maintaining them.
Proof at enterprise scale: Across a 230,000-SKU home décor catalogue, DecoratorsBest reported about 5× more recommendation clicks and 4× more recommendation-influenced orders between 16 March and 15 April 2026. Read the case study.
Proof on the product page: Pretty Lavish raised average order value on recommendation-influenced orders from £126.75 to £159.18 (+25.6%) after adding Shop Similar galleries and Dealbreaker™ Filters. Read the case study.
Hours, not months. Install from the Shopify App Store and our team configures placements, styling and merchandising remotely - no catalogue tagging project and no developer sprint. Enterprise teams we speak to typically plan 6 weeks to 3 months for a discovery platform.
Yes - that is how we recommend starting. RecoMelon runs next to your Apache Solr stack on the same product pages or categories, measured against your current baseline, so the results make the case before anything else changes.
It can for Shopify product discovery. Teams that keep Solr for other retrieval can run RecoMelon on the storefront surfaces.
Generating image embeddings, building similarity and bundle logic, shopper filters, email and 404 integrations, and front-end components - then maintaining all of it.
Sources: Solr dense vector search, Apache Solr, RecoMelon pricing. Checked 24 Oct 2026.
Our team configures RecoMelon remotely and it goes live within hours - no developer sprint, no catalogue project. Run it next to your current setup on the same product pages and let the results make the case.
Compare on your catalogue