Meet Celtilc Ancestry Gifts
Celtic Ancestry Gifts is a family business born from a 4,000-mile connection: a message sent from Glasgow to a small radio station in New Castle, Indiana. That single moment turned into a conversation… then a flight… then a marriage… then a family of eight.
From their home in Tennessee — a place that reminds co-founder Stewart Livingston of the Scottish Highlands — Stewart and Anna built a heritage store dedicated to connecting families with their Celtic roots. With over 2,200 clan and surname designs across thousands of products, nearly every purchase starts the same way:
A customer enters the site and searches for their family name.
If they cannot find it instantly, the moment is lost.
And for years, that’s exactly what was happening.
The Hidden Constraint
Despite their passion for ancestry and authenticity, Celtic Ancestry Gifts was being quietly held back by something deceptively small:
Shopify’s built-in search bar.
When you run a catalog with thousands of heritage-linked items — many tied to surnames with multiple spellings and variations — a weak search system becomes a major leak in the customer journey.
Stewart saw it every day:
- Customers spelling names 10+ different ways
- Irish, Scottish, Welsh surnames with multiple accepted spellings
- People typing fast and making mistakes
- Shopify failing to surface products across categories
- Zero meaningful filtering
The consequences were painful:
- People couldn’t find clans that 100% existed on the site
- Customer support inbox full of “Do you have X surname?”
- Precious time lost to endless manual product-linking
- And the worst one:
- Sales slipped away for no reason other than an avoidable UX flaw
For a family of eight running a fast-growing heritage brand, this was more than a technical issue — it was a critical bottleneck.
The Switch
Stewart installed Rapid Search for one reason:
“If customers can’t find their name in two seconds, none of the rest of the store matters.”
Rapid Search solved every issue created by an underwhelming search experience:
✔ Handles surname variations & synonyms automatically
✔ Recovers misspellings instantly
✔ Indexes every product in every category
✔ Gives customers clean filters and fast, accurate results
✔ Lets the store visually highlight the search bar (critical for this niche)
They wanted a store experience as authentic and reliable as their products. Search had to be part of that promise.
Rapid Search aligned perfectly with the brand’s philosophy of “No Gimmicks — Just Good Value.”
The Transformation
Once Rapid Search went live, the store felt different:
- Customers found their names instantly (even with odd spellings)
- “Do you carry this surname?” messages dropped dramatically
- Customer support workload shrank
- Bounce rate from search plummeted
- Search became the #1 most-engaged element on the site
- The store felt cleaner, faster, and more trustworthy
This wasn’t just an upgrade.
It was a removal of the store’s biggest invisible friction point.
The Numbers That Matter
Before Rapid Search: 0.5% conversion rate
After Rapid Search: 2% conversion rate
A 4× increase in conversions simply by removing search friction.
Additional outcomes included:
- Search-driven revenue jumped — especially during holiday peaks
- Customers repeatedly commented on how “fast” and “easy” it became to find their clan
- Stewart spent far less time sending customers product links
For a catalog where every purchase starts with the search bar, this upgrade didn’t just help.
It fundamentally transformed how the business operates.
Conclusion
Celtic Ancestry Gifts didn’t change their ads.
They didn’t change their product.
They didn’t redesign their store.
They fixed one thing:
They made it instant and effortless for customers to find the family name that brought them to the store in the first place.
When search met customers where they were, everything else followed — the customer experience improved, and the store rose with it.
Congratulations to Stewart, Anna, and the entire Celtic Ancestry Gifts family.
Ready to fix your search? Start your free trial today.
