For more than 25 years, Your Store Wizards has helped online retailers solve complex storefront challenges through custom development, working across platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Turbify to improve user experience, streamline operations, and grow conversion.
Challenges:
- Scaling real-time product search across several hundred eCommerce stores as catalog size and query volume grew
- Maintaining subsecond search and autocomplete performance at scale
- Avoiding the engineering overhead of running search infrastructure in-house
Results:
- Consistent, low-latency OpenSearch performance across millions of queries a week
- Freed up the equivalent of one full-time engineer, over 2,000 hours (260 working days) a year
- Migrated from a legacy Elasticsearch environment to OpenSearch in under 12 hours with no major disruption
Search sits at the center of what Your Store Wizards does. The company’s proprietary platform, Search Magic, powers product discovery for hundreds of online storefronts, from category browsing to autocomplete. Brett Bittke, a developer with the company for more than a decade, described the bar shoppers hold search to. “We’re really focused on giving stores clean, fast search results,” said Bittke. “That’s a core part of the experience for their customers, so it has to just work every time.”
As Search Magic grew to support more stores and larger catalogs, the team needed a search foundation that could scale with it.
Outgrowing a legacy setup
Your Store Wizards had been running Elasticsearch as part of a legacy environment inherited through an acquisition. It worked, but as that environment approached its end of life, the team faced a familiar scaling problem: several hundred active stores, some with catalogs in the hundreds of thousands of products, and weekly query volumes reaching into the millions across category browsing and autocomplete.
Meeting subsecond search response times, with autocomplete often returning results even faster, at that volume takes more than raw capacity. It takes careful indexing, efficient data pipelines, and a system built to hold steady under peak load.
Scaling on OpenSearch
Your Store Wizards moved its search workload to OpenSearch, running as a managed environment through NetApp Instaclustr, one of several providers offering managed OpenSearch. OpenSearch gave the team an open source engine built to handle large, growing indexes without sacrificing query speed, letting Search Magic scale its catalog and query volume without a corresponding jump in engineering effort.
The move was also fast. According to Bittke, migrating off the legacy Elasticsearch environment onto OpenSearch was straightforward, with everything moved over in under 12 hours and no major disruption to the stores it serves.
Within the broader architecture, OpenSearch works alongside MySQL for core data storage and Redis for caching, with APIs and webhooks handling data flow and indexing. For larger stores, indexes can refresh as often as hourly, so product data stays current.
Because the underlying OpenSearch environment is managed rather than self-hosted, Your Store Wizards avoids dedicating a full-time engineer, an estimated 2,000+ hours or roughly 260 working days a year, to cluster provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance. “If we were managing the search infrastructure ourselves, it would take at least one full-time engineer just to keep everything running,” said Bittke. “That’s time we’d rather spend actually improving the product.”
Reinvesting the time saved
Today, Search Magic supports hundreds of active stores and processes millions of queries a week on OpenSearch, with the performance and reliability the team’s customers expect. Freed from infrastructure upkeep, the team has redirected its time toward refining search relevance, tuning performance, and expanding what Search Magic can do, the work that shows up directly in the shopper experience.
“The biggest benefit is just not having to worry about it,” said Bittke. “When something’s running well and you don’t have to think about it, that’s a huge win.”
Learn More
- Read more about the NetApp Instaclustr platform and services at the company website: www.instaclustr.com.
- Explore how Your Store Wizards builds flexible storefronts designed to improve SEO and increase conversion rates.
- Learn more about OpenSearch membership.
- Read the original NetApp Instaclutr case study here: https://www.instaclustr.com/wp-content/uploads/Insta_Case_Study_Your_Store_Wizards.pdf.
