Depict vs Tagalys: Merchandising, Search and Recommendations for Fashion and Lifestyle Brands

Why Fashion Brands Are Seeking Alternatives to Tagalys

Tagalys is a visual merchandising platform for Shopify, built for fashion brands wanting programmatic control over collections, search and recommendations - positioning itself as an alternative to Depict. It offers a Smart Ranking Engine, flexible pinning and, more recently, Looks (styled sets holding together across a collection page), Sequences for building visual aisles, and Markets-aware merchandising for brands selling across regions. Still, fashion brands comparing Depict and Tagalys often need capabilities beyond sequencing and pinning, furthering narrative-led merchandising and contextual product discovery.

For fashion ecommerce managers using or evaluating Tagalys, it’s worth understanding how it compares to Depict. Depict is a fashion and lifestyle alternative to Tagalys, working across Shopify, Centra, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and headless setups. It meets the same merchandising, search, and recommendation needs within a unified platform, with LLM-enhanced search and stronger focus on fashion-aware discovery.

Key Differences: Depict vs Tagalys

Whilst both platforms improve merchandising, search, and recommendations for fashion brands, they take different approaches:

Visual Merchandising Capabilities

For fashion and lifestyle brands, visual presentation of products is crucial to both brand identity and conversion rates. This is where both platforms take different approaches.

Depict’s Fashion and Lifestyle Approach

Depict gives merchandisers control to express brand identity as well as the automation to maintain optimisation across every page. Its visual tools include:

• Content Cards: Add custom-size images, videos and instagram posts to showcase brand identity, with hover and default images per collection.
• Pinned Products: Pin products to specific positions, maintaining editorial control without battling the algorithm.
• Repeated Products: Surface the same product across various collection pages, without duplication.
• Product Image Selector: Choose the image that best represents each product, as per the collection’s context.
• Smart Sorting: Set merchandising rules once, and apply everywhere. Boost bestsellers, burying out-of-stock items, whilst maintaining pinned products’ positions.

Tagalys' Programmatic Control

Tagalys centres its visual merchandising around rules and performance data:

• Trending Score: Each product is ranked by engagement, tag signals, and freshness; updated daily.
• Pin with Conditions: Pin any product to any position, with conditions to move it automatically when stock, size or season changes.
• Looks: Group 2-8 products into styled sets that stay together when moved on Shopify PLPs, can be reused across different pages via LookBooks.
• Sequences: Create visual aisles by colour, drop or narrative, as you would with a physical store.
• Markets: Localise sorting and pinning by Shopify Market without duplicating collections.

Search & Discovery Experience

Fashion and lifestyle shoppers often search with more descriptive and contextual language than a typical query. For example, ‘boho summer dress’, as opposed to a SKU or category name.

Depict: Understanding Shopper Language

Depict’s Search is AI-powered, combining semantic understanding with keyword search and merchandising rules, working less statically and more like an in-store sales associate:

• Hybrid Search: Runs each query through AI, keyword matching, merchandising rules, automated synonyms and automated translations in parallel.
• Search Everything: One query surfaces products, collections, policy pages and editorial content, reducing bounce rate for answers already on-site.
• AI Overviews: Conversational LLM-generated summaries answer queries about sizing directly within the results.
• Searchandising: Apply merchandising strategy directly to search results: pin, boost and bury products in alignment with campaigns and business goals.

Tagalys: Rules-Based Search

Tagalys’ search is built around control and tuning versus understanding natural language:

• Predictive Search: Surfaces results as shoppers type, handling typos before they finish.
• Search Accuracy: Fixes inaccurate results at index-level, rather than per query.
• Pinned and Popular Search: Allows pinning specific results, popular queries or what is trending in search.
• Search Results: Enables refinement and customisation for what appears for any given query.

Product Recommendations

Merchandising, search and recommendations are becoming increasingly synchronised rather than operating as three separate tools. A shopper’s view of a collection page should inform the products they are recommended, and vice versa. Both platforms treat recommendations as a core part of the stack, not just an add-on.

Depict: Style-Aware Recommendations

Depict meshes products, AOV, and behavioural strategy into a singular recommendation engine, governed by the same merchandising rules across search and collections:

• Same brand and Similar Products: AI reads visual and stylistic product similarity, from images and descriptions as well as shared tags and categories.
• Shop The Look: Surfaces complementary pieces to complete an outfit.
• Cross-sell and Upsell: Increases order value with genuinely fitting pairings.
• Previously Seen and Search Intent: Personalises based on search and browse behaviour, blended per shopper.

Tagalys: Data-Driven Recommendations

Tagalys uses first-party behavioural and performance data to build their recommendations:

• Similar Products: Suggests alternatives when products are out of stock, aiding with sales recovery.
• Trending/Bestsellers: Surfaces high-performing products to increase cart value.
• New Arrivals: Highlights recently added products, in sync with the same trending data powering collection ranking.

Ease of Implementation

Getting your merchandising solution running quickly matters, especially with seasonal collections and frequent inventory changes.

Depict: Minutes, Not Weeks

• Live on Shopify, Centra and headless setups for Visual Merchandising and Search, with Recommendations rolling out to Shopify next.
• Cuts up to 70% of routine merchandising and optimisation work, creating collection pages in minutes.
• Intuitive UI merchandisers can use without technical expertise.
• Multimarket and multi-store tailoring, replicating strategy across multiple wider regions and storefronts.

Tagalys: Server-Side, Rules-Based Setup

• Shopify and Shopify Plus integration built round Server-Side delivery, ensuring pages arrive complete on first load.
• Trending score automatically promoting top performers.
• Visual, rules-based interface for building and combining merchandising conditions
• Pin with Conditions, Looks, Sequences and Markets, replicated across collections and regions.
• Size Merchandising to account for size availability across the product catalogue

Customer Feedback

Fashion and lifestyle brands using Depict have highlighted significant measurable results:

"A tremendous uplift from the built-in Search & Discovery function. We have seen a 316% increase in searches and 15% reduction in support tickets." - Douglas Holm, Head of Online at Myrqvist

"Merchandising with Depict takes 75% less time compared to our previous tool." - Benjamin Östgårdh, Head of Ecommerce at Stiga

Tagalys customers point to responsiveness and ease to use:

"I appreciate the responsiveness and reactivity of the Tagalys team. The tool has great user-friendliness and has allowed us to boost sales with cross-sell features. We can pin our entire product catalog and control the entire website's merchandising."- Maria M., E-Merchandiser & Content Manager

Pricing Considerations

Depict’s published pricing starts at $152/month for Merchandising or Search and $88/month for Recommendations, for stores with up to 50,000 monthly sessions (billed annually), with pricing scaling per tier as traffic increases. Bundling all three products adds a 10% discount in addition to the 20% annual billing discount offered. Every plan includes the full toolkit, with no features gated by tier. Custom pricing applies only specifically for multi-market or multi-store setups, and monthly plans can be cancelled at any time.

Tagalys doesn’t publish flat pricing tiers, instead their plans are built per store, based on monthly unique visitors and the selected features, with cost scaling therefore with usage rather than being a fixed rate. Each plan includes personalised onboarding and ongoing support with no long-term contract and free upgrades or downgrades at any time. A 28-day free trial is available to start.

Is Depict Right for Your Fashion or Lifestyle Brand?

Depict tends to be the stronger fit for fashion and lifestyle brands that:

• Want to create visually appealing, high-converting collection pages
• Value brand-led storytelling as well as performance metrics
• Want to save time on merchandising whilst also improving results
• Want to embed rich media, such as video, social content and varied imagery, onto collection pages
• Sell more than on Shopify, or want the room to expand beyond it without re-platforming
• Want AI-driven search built to understand shopper intent, not just keywords

Conclusion: Choosing Between Depict and Tagalys

For fashion and lifestyle brands building visually compelling shopping experiences, both Depict and Tagalys offer real value, with different strengths.

Depict leans into the narrative-driven product discovery experience, LLM-powered hybrid search, style-aware recommendations, and native support for embedding video and social content, across Shopify, Centra, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and headless setups.

Tagalys leans into programmatic, rules-based control: automated ranking, flexible pinning, styled Looks, performance-based recommendations and market-by-market merchandising for primarily Shopify and Shopify Plus brands.

If you prioritise AI-driven search, native content integration, or are looking for a platform that grows with you beyond Shopify, Depict is likely the better fit. If your priority is granular, rules-based control within a Shopify-only setup, Tagalys is worth looking closer at.

Ready to see how Depict can transform your fashion and lifestyle collections? Book a demo.