How PitShop Delivers Consistent Automotive Search Across Two Baltic Markets

The Merchant

PitShop is a Baltic automotive care retailer with dedicated storefronts in Lithuania and Latvia. The catalogue spans auto cosmetics, engine and transmission oils, brake fluids, coolants, car interior care products, and maintenance accessories - covering both professional and consumer automotive care needs.

It is a technically oriented catalogue. Automotive care buyers - particularly the professional mechanics and car enthusiasts who make up a significant portion of the customer base - search with specificity. They look for a particular viscosity grade, a specific brand's professional line, or a product formulated for a specific vehicle type. Imprecise search results waste their time and send them elsewhere.

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The Challenge: One Catalogue, Two Markets, One Search Standard

Operating two independent storefronts on PrestaShop introduces a predictable problem: maintaining consistent search quality across both stores requires either double the configuration effort, or a search solution that manages both from a unified layer.

PitShop's specific challenge was threefold:

• Product terminology varies by market - professional automotive care terminology differs between Lithuanian and Latvian, and colloquial product names vary between the two markets. A search engine tuned for one market underperforms in the other.
• Technical specification searches - customers searching for "5W-30 full synthetic" or "pH-neutral car shampoo" need to reach precisely the right product, not a general category listing.
• Brand-led navigation - many automotive care buyers search by brand first (Meguiar's, Liqui Moly, Koch Chemie), and the autocomplete experience needs to guide them from brand to the right product line immediately.

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Why BRADsearch

BRADsearch allowed PitShop to run a single, well-configured search layer across both storefronts rather than maintaining two separate search setups with separate synonym libraries and relevance tuning.

For a merchant running multi-store PrestaShop, this matters operationally as well as technically. Every hour spent manually configuring search for one storefront is an hour not spent on product, pricing, or customer service. BRADsearch's architecture supports multi-store deployments from a shared backbone - with language-level customisation where it matters and unified management where it saves time.

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Implementation

The BRADsearch deployment for PitShop covered:

• Multi-store PrestaShop integration covering both Lithuanian and Latvian storefronts
• Language-specific synonym configuration - Lithuanian and Latvian automotive terminology mapped to the shared product catalogue
• Brand-led autocomplete with visual product suggestions - buyers who start typing a brand name are guided toward the relevant product line within two or three keystrokes
• Technical specification indexing - viscosity grades, formulation types, and product classifications indexed as searchable attributes rather than buried in descriptions

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The Outcome

Since deploying BRADsearch, PitShop's search experience across both storefronts meets the expectations of automotive care buyers who search with precision.

• Technical specification searches resolve accurately - queries like "5W-30 synthetic" or "iron decontamination spray" reach the correct product, not an unfiltered list
• Brand-first searches guide buyers efficiently - customers who search by brand reach the relevant product line in fewer interactions
• Consistent quality across both markets - Lithuanian and Latvian storefronts return equally relevant results for equivalent queries in each language
• Reduced management overhead - the team manages search configuration once rather than duplicating effort across two storefronts

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Key Takeaway: Multi-Store Search Should Be a Multiplier, Not a Multiplied Problem

Merchants who operate multiple storefronts often find that search is the first thing that diverges between them - one store is well-tuned, the other is left at defaults. BRADsearch's multi-store architecture removes that trade-off: consistent search quality across all storefronts, managed from a unified layer.

For automotive care specifically, the precision of technical specification search pays back in customer satisfaction and in conversion. Buyers who find exactly what they searched for buy. Buyers who do not, leave.

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