The Recommendations preview now shows merchandisers what strategy is powering each product result, the primary strategy or a backfill strategy. This helps merchandisers understand why a product is returned and identify opportunities to merchandise results if the bestsellers are not preferred. The image below shows an example of how the first product is from the complementary product recommendations results and the last products are backfilled bestsellers. 

Merchandisers can decide to leave the results above as they are or slot specific products into later positions if bestsellers are not preferred. Check out the new strategy labels by clicking on the preview button directly on the pod listing page in the dashboard. 

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

Our goal at Constructor is to continuously improve the business KPIs that you care about, which means we’re constantly looking for ways to enhance results and one of those ways is through our auto-generated synonyms. 

We’ve always shown auto-generated synonyms in the dashboard, but it hasn’t always been easy to understand which ones are new - until today!

Now dashboard users will be able to see which auto-generated synonyms were recently added with a “new” badge next to each newly added synonym. This badge will remain visible for up to 2 weeks, or until another set of auto-generated synonyms are added, whichever comes first. 

Dashboard users will also see a notification on the home screen when new synonyms have been added so you never have to worry about missing them in the synonyms section of the dashboard.

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

What’s new this week from Engineering at Constructor?   Well, any given week the fifteen teams within Constructor’s globally distributed engineering department complete around a hundred tickets and launch them in production as they are ready.  

But as a list of a hundred tickets is a bit demanding attention wise, we are going to highlight some of the more interesting things that we released this week and ask that you visualize us smushing bugs and helping customers with the rest of our time, in the style of an exterminator themed Mario from Nintendo. Which actually existed (the character was called Stanley the Bugman).  And now the updates!  This week we:

• Updated various software dependencies to stay ahead of the curve on security
• Added a new and improved traffic splitter for A/B testing different platform configurations
• Added new data pipelines to predict which group a non-grouped product should exist in
• Added functionality to append structured content to collection results from the customer dashboard
• Conducted an analysis of position bias in results across a range of customers
• Enabled bundle recommendations, a new recommendations algorithm we’ve seen lead to conversion and revenue lifts in multiple ab tests, across most customers

Let’s-a-go!

~ Engineering at Constructor.

We’re excited to be further expanding our newest searchandizing rule, Content, to Browse and Collections. 

With this new rule type merchandisers will be able to add all kinds of contextually relevant content to their Browse and Collections experiences, in addition Search, to help provide their site visitors with the best possible experience, especially in instances where some additional content around a new product launch, a promotion, or key information about shopping for a given type of product aids in the overarching experience. 

Content in Browse and Collections have all of the same functionality and flexibility that Content in Search offers. You can read up on full details here. 

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

Revenue Lift at MACH Speed with Composable Shopping Experiences

Move faster and connect closer with shopping experiences your customers will love and translate into unparalleled bottom line revenue. commercetools and Constructor have pioneered the future of commerce technology as launching members of the MACH Alliance and are trusted by leading brands such as Sephora, Baby Bunting, and The Very Group. 

Constructor Connect for commercetools is the turnkey connector between two MACH leaders in ecommerce and product discovery and delivers on the promise of composable architectures: adding more business value fast, with the flexibility and control you need to drive strategic merchandising across every moment in your customers’ journey. With the highest scalability, uptime and resilience—because digital commerce never sleeps.

commercetools customers can now leverage the revenue-lifting power of Constructor Commerce Search and Product Discovery in less than a day:

• Fast and guided configuration to connect commercetools catalogs and ensure ongoing synchronization
• Supported and maintained by Constructor to ensure data connectivity follows best practices, ensuring optimal security and scalability 
• Ease of Administration with Constructor Dashboards for catalog ingestion status 

For more information, please contact your Customer Success Manager, view our documentation, or reach out at partners@constructor.io.

Constructor’s benefits are only as good as our uptime and performance. For this reason, we have robust standards around both. During the holiday season and the peak demand period of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we increase our standards out of recognition that it is the most important selling period for many of our customers.

Over the past year we worked continuously to drive even better performance and scalability, contributing to improved latencies and zero downtime.  We tested scaling to 2000% of current average daily traffic volume.  We used chaos testing to validate that catastrophic failure of the following supporting infrastructure does not impact critical features.  And on top of that from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday we:

• Freeze all deployments except for the most critical fixes
• Over-provision all infrastructure above and beyond typical scale-out policy
• Double our on call rotations for automated alerts
• Enter a state of elevated monitoring of all services

We take uptime and performance very seriously because the best conversion optimization and machine learning are moot if we do not deliver fast and stable service consistently. Please feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you have any further questions.

And now for the updates!  What’s new this week from Engineering at Constructor?  We’ve been cooking up more than a few things.  In fact we’ve made lots and lots, with some powdered freeze dried lots sprinkled on top. In addition to improving platform uptime and performance, smushing various minor bugs, and helping customers, we also:

• Added more data points to our core analytics platform for future merchant analytics needs
• Improved dashboards and monitoring of internal services in advance of Black Friday
• Upgraded support for quizzes in multiple client SDK's (Python, JavaScript, Android, Node)
• Experimented with running internal services on ARM based architectures for improved performance
• Added support for ingesting product catalogs directly from Salesforce using cartridges
• Prepared several tests to be run at a later date for various product ranking models
• Added facet to facet filters for recommendations
• … and tested a new backfilling approach for complementary recommendations

Bon appetit.

~ Engineering at Constructor.

Until today filtering recommendation results has only been available on the API, but now it is easier than ever for merchandisers to specify filtered results using our dashboard. Merchandisers can apply business logic on recommendation results by applying “show only” filters to return results only from specified facets or categories. For example, retailers might have a vendor partner agreement that requires them to show only products from their brand in certain contexts. Another example is matching sets, if recommendations are shown for a bikini top, show only bikini bottoms. 

The Interact example below shows how “show only” filters limit results. A “show only speedo branded products” filter returns only speedo goggles and no other brand in the recommendation results below.

This ‘Show Only’ filter is applied in the recommendations merchandising menu at the strategy level. Merchandisers choose an input attribute for the rule to apply and an attribute to which results will be filtered. 

The image above highlights the process of selecting categories or facets options to filter recommendation results. Merchandisers can search or browse through their category hierarchy and facet options to set the filtered result. 

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

A key component of website merchandising for most folks includes preparing for product launches and promotional activities. Whether it is a one-day Flash Sale, a much larger Black Friday event or a new product launch these types of activities often require some level of site merchandising to ensure the experience is just right. 

This type of merchandising often includes rules that are time-boxed for the future - to kick in at the start of the sale or the launch and then end after a predetermined amount of time. Until today, those rules needed to be previewed in real time as they were being set up. Now, we’re excited to announce that there is a new, seamless way to preview the entire experience across multiple categories or queries as a holistic review of the final experience for your site visitors, while ensuring that all your rules and any future-dated products will come alive precisely when intended. 

Date picker available next to search input in Interact page.

Within Interact, you can now select a date in the future to see the effect of any future-dated rules apply to the result set, and if you’re using our Product Launch capabilities then you’ll be able to see future-dated products come into the result set as well. 

Within the calendar view, you can see a summary of when searchandising rules start and end, as indicated with the red and blue dot indicators so that you can easily see when you have new rules taking effect and rules ending.

Calendar view with indicators for rule starting and ending. 

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

In our latest update we head to an area of the dashboard that isn’t often the topic of release notes but important nonetheless - today we’re talking about the Catalog Uploads Page within the “Integration” tab in the dashboard. 

We have made a couple of changes to this page including a UI refresh so that it matches the rest of the dashboard for a more seamless experience. We have also added in user-friendly index names everywhere that we reference a particular index. These names are the same ones that are set in the “Indexes” section of the dashboard so they’ll always be familiar and easy to understand. 

Updated UI for Catalog Uploads page in “Integration” section of the dashboard.

And we’re not done with updates to this page, we have a couple more updates coming up on the horizon, including refreshing the pop-up experience when you click on a given catalog update for more information and adding pagination so that you can see more than the last 100 updates for any single index.  

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

Merchandisers have long been able to build bundles on our dashboard by manually slotting items in the complementary strategy. Now a new bundles strategy leverages Constructor's AI to automatically generate product recommendation bundles, a set of items that are frequently purchased together, making this shopping experience even easier to create. Bundles AB testing has shown increases in recommendation add-to-cart and purchase metrics by 2 - 4%, leading to a better shopping experience and increased business KPIs. The recommendations Interact view below shows what a shopper would see if they were looking at a lifeguard fanny pack with a bundles pod. 

The bundle strategy returns items that are most frequently co-purchased as a set with the seed product, the main product on the product detail page (PDP). We recommend showing the seed product, in this case the fanny pack, along with the visor and tee as a bundle with the option to add-to-cart all three at once on a PDP. The test results show strong shopper preference for purchasing well crafted bundles together. Bundles perform well when presented as a limited set to add all to cart together, but we still recommend using complementary or other preferred recommendations pods beneath these results to allow for additional discovery should the shopper not be in buying mode.

Bundles can be found in the Recommendations section of the dashboard under the list of available strategies. Deploying this new strategy is the same as adding any other strategy to an existing or new pod (see screenshot below).