Interact has long been a powerful tool to preview experiences, see how the results change with different ranking factors and engage with facets to see how the results change in various scenarios that your site visitors may experience. Although the feature has always had high usage, we’ve gotten feedback from our users over the last few months that they want to be able to use it to emulate the experience when searching within an individual store, or brand, or account within a bigger index. This has been especially appealing for our customers who use Constructor to power BOPIS and B2B.

You asked, we listened. Now, we’re taking that a step further by making Hidden Facets available in Interact within the Dashboard as well. This can be handy in instances where you are doing query-level filtering for attributes like store ID, or item availability by location or B2B account where you want your visitors to experience different results powered by hidden facets. 

Now dashboard users will be able to see what the experience would look like for a user after they’ve selected their preferred store, or they can see what products are returning with facets that aren’t shown to users on their site.  

Within Interact, this is now available below the Shown Facets in the bottom of the left-hand panel.

For more information, questions or feedback please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Merchandisers create rules within the Constructor dashboard to adjust the product discovery results in search and browse, however, there hasn’t been easy access to data showing the effects of those rules on business KPIs. Now, within a day of creating a searchandizing rule, the rules that under or over perform historical expectations will be flagged, sorted for review, and action can be taken to remove under performing rules or continue rules that outperform. With this sorted list, merchandisers can focus their attention on the most critical rules to restore conversions or continue rules that are providing positive results.  

There are two ways to see the alerts, the first is the Rule Performance dashboard in Analytics. This page sorts by add-to-cart gains or losses and allows users to determine if the rule is still meeting its purpose or if it's time to change the rule. Lost or gained add-to-carts are calculated by multiplying the viewers who saw the slotted product by the difference in conversion rates from the time period the product was slotted versus when it was not slotted, giving a prioritized estimate on total rule impact. 

Rule performance alerts are also available in the review icons on the Searchandizing rule creation page. Once the rule is opened in edit view, the product cards will now display over and under performance badges with details on conversion rate differences. In the example below, the performance badge shows the item in position one is converting at 2.24%, while the typical conversion rate for position one in this query when not slotted is 15%. This rule may have an alternative purpose beside KPI optimization, i.e. new product promotion, vendor agreements, visual appeal of results, or others, but now conversion data is easily available when making decisions on slotting rules.  

Many rules merchandisers create also lead to positive results. The rule performance dashboard can also be viewed from most add-to-cart gains and any item that outperforms the position average will have a green high conversion badge. Merchandisers can learn from successful slotting campaigns to see what hypotheses were correct and what types of rules to continue in the future. 

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io. Stay tuned for more announcements to come on rule performance and reference this zendesk help article to learn more about the metrics.

This is a beta release of new data available from our merchant intelligence product to help merchandisers make data driven decisions within our product discovery platform. Stay tuned over the next couple weeks as we add additional data views to give merchandisers more context on rule performance including time series data on conversion performance and other detailed views.

In order to continue to power best in class experiences in ecommerce, we are excited to release the ability to set contextually optimized facets for Collections! 

Building on top of our existing capabilities to control facets for category pages, merchandisers can now set Collection specific facets in the dashboard. 

Say you’ve got a Collection for summer essentials from top brands, but your brand facet is globally positioned in spot 6 across your site, you might want to bring it to the top so your site visitors can see the top brands easily, and quickly further refine for their favourites. 

Alternatively maybe you have a collection for an upcoming sale you’re running. You usually have a facet for “on sale” to allow for shoppers looking for a deal to better refine for marked down products, but in this instance everything is on sale so maybe you want to remove it to bring more contextually relevant facets to the top of the list. 

This can be found under the “Facets” tab within the dashboard as of today.

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

The world of retail is a complex one and at Constructor we understand that you might have a physical presence that isn’t captured by “online only” platforms. That’s why we want to connect your offline physical world with your online virtual world so that you can take advantage of both in one place, and see the results in enhanced KPIs that consider your whole business, not just part of it. We’ve long offered the ability to send us data from what happens in-store, but it was never very easy to do. That’s about to change.

We’re proud to announce the release of our new Offline Purchases API that you can now use to capture all those offline sales and incorporate them into improved personalisation for your customers and KPIs for your business.

Using this API you can send us up to 100 purchase events in a single request, including prices, quantities, and store location details.

To log an event, send an authenticated request to:

The JSON payload contains the list of items that were purchased. For example, a customer purchased one item at $34.99 and two each at $17.99:

Note that the ui parameter is optional, so in the event you don’t have a way to identify the customer for a purchase, you can still send in the purchase event for the behaviour to be included in our KPI-optimised algorithms.

With this change, you’ll be able to take the rich set of interactions customers have in your physical stores and leverage them for an improved customer experience. Use cases include truly omnichannel personalization that lets a customer have a personalized experience online that learns from their preferences in store, better personalizing in-store experiences when searching on a kiosk inside a store, and improving the overall machine learning engine as a whole by informing the system of what types of products get bought in physical vs online contexts and what products that get researched online lead to purchases in the store.

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

We’ve long provided multiple ways for customers to update their catalogue and ensure that we always have the most recent data with which to provide an amazing product discovery experience for end users. These methods include HTTPS (REST), FTPS, and a synchronous Items API (V1, also REST).

Now, we’re excited to tell you about our all-new asynchronous Items API (V2) that allows you to send in your updates and then check a Tasks API to get status updates on their progress.

The new V2 API has a number of benefits:

• Ability to send up to 1,000 entries in a single call, allowing for real time updates of many thousands of products per second.
• Extended open data structure for increased flexibility in the data you can send us and how it’s sent.
• Direct interoperability with the Constructor dashboard, so updates sent via the V2 API appear in the dashboard and are viewable and auditable in the Integration tab there so you can easily check what you’ve sent, when it was sent, and what its status is.
• Deterministic, FIFO processing, so updates are processed in exactly the order you send them.

For customers with systems that already send out regular product updates this will be the preferred method of integration since it will be easier and more efficient to connect to and develop against. We recommend that it is combined with a daily full catalogue sync via the HTTPS or FTPS methods.

Example request:

Sample item JSON payload:

Instead of needing to wait for the response to tell you when the update is successfully accepted, you will now receive a task ID in the response:

You can call the Tasks API with the ID to check the progress:

We also have an asynchronous V2 Variations API for variation updates, and PATCH methods for both APIs to allow you to send us just the fields that have changed.

For full documentation on these new APIs see here.

Stay tuned for DELETE methods for both APIs, coming soon!

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Products can be labeled as sponsored while creating slotting rules in the dashboard. The label will be displayed on the product card whenever the sponsored slotting rule is applied in search, browse, or autosuggest. 

Example product card with sponsored label preview in the dashboard:

Brand partners will often pay to have their products returned in top search results or in key positions on browse pages. Merchandisers have had success adding revenue streams by selling these product placements in search and browse results. Merchandisers need to make these product sponsorships transparent to shoppers and had to previously use a third party tool to place these labels on product results. Now when merchandisers create these sponsored rules, they can add in the sponsored label all in the Constructor dashboard.

Increased revenue, accurate transparency for shoppers, and ease for merchandisers all in one place!

The new sponsored label button is in slotting rule creation left menu.

Merchandisers can label products as sponsored from the searchandizing rules left sidebar where rules are normally configured. A new label icon is in the side navigation which toggles the “sponsored” label on and off when activated (see images below). When the icon is toggled on (blue), the product is now labeled as sponsored in the rule query or browse location.

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Our API documentation (retrieve rules example) has been updated with details on the labels fields and how it is returned in the new response. 

One of our key focuses is to ensure that the APIs customers use are always fast and efficient. To that end, we have introduced a parameter that will allow users of the search, browse and autocomplete APIs to specify which attributes are included in the variations response, enabling you to reduce the size of the payload and shave valuable milliseconds off your page load times. For users with slower connections (e.g. a cell phone with just one bar) that can mean results hundreds of milliseconds faster, the difference between now and an eternity in the world of ecommerce.

Want to display a price range on your products on your product listing page? No problem, you can add the variations_map parameter to your browse API request with the following JSON to only show an aggregated price range for all variation groups under each item (this example has a price field within the data object; your structure may be different):

Now instead of the entire variation object structure, you will receive the following in the response for each item:

There are many ways to customise these calls to get just what you need. Documentation for this new parameter can be found here.

For more information, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Facet Option Sort in the Dashboard

We’ve long supported the ability to configure Facet Option sorting using the API, and now it is available in the dashboard for all users to modify. 

There are three options available to sort facets at the option level, these include: 

• Query Attractiveness
• Alphanumeric
• Number of Matches

While we generally recommend that Facet Options are sorted by Query Attractiveness (default) to help ensure the most attractive option is surfaced, we know there might be times when a different configuration could make sense too. 

Maybe you want to set a heuristic with customers for specific facets so they can more easily find the option that best suits their needs. This could mean setting a size facet alphanumerically so all the numbers show in order, or maybe you want to clearly show customers how the results of a given query are spread across various brand options by ranking them by how many products are available from each brand, you could sort them by number of matches. 

This can be found in the Manage Facets section of the dashboard, within the Indexes tab.  

New Documentation

We also made some changes to the documentation available in the dashboard. Previously there was just one link to “Docs” which took users to docs.constructor.io which is primarily our API documentation which is more technically focused.

We also have more merchandiser focused documentation available throughout the dashboard from relevant touchpoints, but we’ve never provided a generic link into all of that documentation from one place - until now!

New in the header you’ll find that we’ve renamed our existing documentation link from “Docs” to “API Docs” to make it more clear what those are, and we’ve added a new link to our more business friendly documentation in the “Knowledgebase” link. 

As we continue improving product discovery by giving customers new tools and levers to pull, we’re very pleased to announce our new Product Launches functionality. This provides the ability to time the release of a product without worrying about waiting for a reindex to run, remembering to time an upload or configuring complicated rules right before the launch. All you need to do is set the date, and wait!

We know that there might be restrictions on when you’re able to show new products to your customers, whether they be for legal reasons, or because you want to make a big splash in the market with a timed launch. Now you can do this by including a release date and time on a product in your catalogue feed. Then when you run a search or browse query, that product will not be returned until the time is met.

For example, if you have an index that serves users in North America, and you want to time the launch of a product to midnight PDT on May 1st, simply set the following on the product in your catalogue feed:

As soon as the west coast reaches midnight, the product will be returned in search and browse queries.

In addition, we make it easy to check that the right date is set. This can be done by viewing the product in the Indexes tab of the Dashboard, or by overriding “now” in the API to see what the returned results will look like at some time in the future.

Continuing to ensure our services are resilient and easy to use is one of our commitments to our customers. 

Sometimes you just need to be able to quickly check if an API is responding, without implementing an expensive call. To that end, we have introduced a series of health check endpoints for our products. Now you can make a fast, lightweight call just to verify the status.

The following endpoints have been implemented:

• Search: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/search
• Autocomplete: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/autocomplete
• Browse: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/browse
• Recommendations: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/recommendations
• Collections: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/collections
• Ingestion: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/ingestion

If the API is up and running, you will get back an OK status message:

Further documentation on these endpoints can be found here:

• Search: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/search/queries#system-status
• Autocomplete: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/autocomplete_queries#system-status
• Browse: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/browse/queries#system-status
• Recommendations: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/recommendations#system-status
• Collections: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/collections/#system-status
• Ingestion: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/full_catalog#system-status