Improvements

• Updated conversion dashboard. Constructor is focused on the goal of realizing KPI wins together with our customers. One key part of that is allowing flexible definitions of success and full view of top-of-funnel events. The conversion dashboard now allows filtering to display either purchase events or top-of-funnel success events including add to carts, likes, test drives, marketplace messages or purchase events. Previously this was a backend configuration during onboarding and in the future we'll report on each of these top-of-funnel events separately across the dashboard as well.
  
  
• Searchandizing scrolling behavior. Left and right panes in searchandizing scroll independently now, making it simpler to create rules and review their effect.

Catalog Integrity

• Reduced variance in catalog ingestion time. Depending on resource availability and usage patterns, some customers will see 20-50% better consistency in catalog ingestion times.
• Download catalog files directly from the dashboard. We added a quick link to download a catalog from the catalog ingestion dashboard allowing customers to quickly validate feed data if there are questions or exceptions.
  
• Catalog integrity validation endpoints. We released an API endpoint to validate catalog feed product counts for all facets. This endpoint allows customers to programmatically request the count of items for each brand or other facets in order to check the catalog integrity and alert on any differences.
• Catalog upload failsafe. Sometimes the worst thing happens, and customers upload an empty feed to the FTP and HTTP sync endpoints. We've recently released a failsafe to reject feed updates that would delete more than a certain threshold of products (currently set to 50%). This behavior is documented here and here.

Fixes

• Fixed interact impersonation. Fixed a bug where interact impersonation worked unreliably and would sometimes require a page load to display personalization effects.
• Fixed broken link from one-way synonym page to interact page.
• Fixed bug which could led to synonyms of the format AxB (2x2, 4x4) to fail to resolve in certain edge cases.

Improvements:

• Item boost rules in collections. Item boosts allow merchant teams to increase the rank of items dynamically without having to rigidly fix position with slotting. This feature has been available globally, as well as for specific browse and search contexts. With this release, the capability is available in Collections searchandizing as well!
  
  
• Disable fallback for recently viewed recommendation strategy. The recently viewed recommendation strategy provides an easy way to promote products a user viewed most recently, but several customers didn't want this to fallback to some other strategy, such as bestsellers. This is now possible - reach out to support@constructor.io or your customer success rep if you want to make this change.
• Catalog upload speed improvements. With more and more large customer catalogs in the millions of items, update speed is more important. A couple of related changes improved the speed of full (sync) catalog ingestion for customers using the FTP and HTTP catalog endpoints by 20-200%.
• Improved support for Chinese. Constructor has supported CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) languages and Right-to-left languages (Hebrew & Arabic) since our founding, but we recently released dramatic improvements for Chinese search to serve our growing Chinese-language customer base. Since Chinese lacks spaces between characters, it's critical to deduce which characters should be grouped together as logical 'words' when evaluating product matches. We now handle this inference when users query and also when analyzing historical user behavior to determine likely intent.

API Releases:

• Product data endpoint. Ever want to request product data from a lightning fast service with fraction of a second latency? This endpoint allows exactly that! Customers are using this endpoint to serve PDP traffic, product pods in various contexts across the site and more. Even better, filtering expressions are supported as well, allowing this endpoint to serve the correct price and availability information when the same index serves availability for several regions, or for Buy Online Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) use cases. Read more here.

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that prevented removing a fixed position for a facet option in the facet configuration page.
• Fixed a date mismatch where some analytics charts on a page would appear to be off by 1 day from the selected time range.
• Fixed link from dashboard homepage to merchant tools.

Faster analytics pagination

Paginating through search and opportunities analytics pages no longer requires a full page reload, making the experience almost a second faster for most users. Look for a faster conversion analytics page soon!

Pagination memory

Users conducting in-depth analysis often move between a listing of many terms or pages and detailed analytics about each. Previously, the page a user was on before clicking through on a particular search term wasn't remembered, forcing users to open multiple tabs or page through results repeatedly. Not fun!

We now remember the pagination state for all of our pages, making quicker work of analysis and optimization work. Check it out.

Pagination reset with new search term or category page in interact

In interact, clicking to the second page of results and then searching for a different term (or category) would maintain the selection of the second page, resulting in confusion about what would be shown on the first page of the search or browse results. We now reset the current page selection when searching for a new term to preview.

We have heard from many teams that have the goal to increase exposure for certain product(s). This typically occurs for several potential reasons:

• A major product is launching with a huge marketing push. 
• A new brand is launching with enormous fanfare.
• Some items have particularly high inventory and need to be 'overexposed' across the site or app.

While automated ML increases ranking for new items, price changes and more, we see an opportunity to provide more hints and input to this based on outside events, promotions or goals outside business as usual. Not all product or brand launches are created equally.

We've long allowed merchants to supplement our AI with rules at the category, query and global levels on the basis of product attributes, metrics or a combination thereof. Our recommendation is apply these overrides sparingly and strategically, "managing by exception" to supplement the AI. 

Now we add the ability to pick a set of products to which a boost should be applied globally across all search or browse pages. While these pages will still serve results optimized for business KPIs, items with a global boost associated will have their rank elevated significantly! In specific terms, a strong boost amounts to roughly one standard deviation - essentially items in the middle of the pack will now show up towards the top.

Finally, we also allow users to preview the effect of these global rules on any search or browse page with the same searchandizing interface your team is used to using!

Want to see a quick video? Take a look here:

Collections let merchants design product experiences for marketing campaigns, site experiences and more with a mix of dynamic rules and individual product uploads. Want to create a page for the men's ski jackets on sale from three of your top brands? Collections are your answer!

We've launched two new features for collections:

• Collections interact Preview collections as if you were a user on your site, complete with facets, product data and ranking explanations!
• Collections click tracking See detailed click data for the last 30 days! See overall views, clicks and click-through rates, as well as how many times every single product was clicked!

Customers are using collections to power millions of browse page views and and tens of millions of revenue -- these tools improve the capabilities of this already strong component of the Constructor browse product.

Want to learn more about integrating collections? Reach out to your customer success representative!

Slotting is a powerful tool to spotlight or feature products at the top of search or browse pages. However, when users filter down on results from a specific brand or in a particular price range, it's important to ensure the returned products match the provided filters.

We applied this logic to all search and browse pages, but certain collection pages didn't follow this same behavior - this release ensures we do this for all collections.