Merchandisers can now include the main product on a page in bundle/complete-the-look recommendations results, returned in the first position of results. This option makes it easier for shoppers to see the whole bundle/complete-the-look recommendations set and quickly make decisions on adding the entire set to cart. The image below shows bundle recommendations for a men’s blue jacket. With the primary product included in the results, shoppers can press “add all to cart” with one click and purchase the entire bundle. This approach reduces friction on shoppers and helps improve Average Order Value (AOV).

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

Keeping your catalog up to date with Constructor is a critical part of your product discovery experience, and it’s just got even more flexible. We’ve introduced two new actions to help you maintain the items and variations, allowing you to update just the data you want.

All of the existing methods to send us delta updates (REST endpoints and FTPS) now also have the ability to either ignore or create items if they do not already exist.

The first, Patch Delta Ignore, works the same way as a regular patch delta but ignores the items and variations which are in the files or request but not in the system.

The second, Patch Delta Create, also works the same way as the regular patch delta but adds items and variations which are in the files or request but not in the system.

If you are using FTP to send deltas, the file names should be in the following format:

key_7AeGOdJ9BxmKF942_Products_patchdeltaignore_2023-05-10-16-18-00.tar.gz
key_7AeGOdJ9BxmKF942_Products_patchdeltacreate_2023-05-10-16-18-00.tar.gz

For the catalog and items & variations endpoints, add on_missing=IGNORE or on_missing=CREATE to the URL parameters.

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

Being able to analyse the performance of your product discovery experience is important, and to that end we’re excited to announce that we have released Collections Analytics.

Collections are a great way to present a curated selection of products to your customers and are useful in a multitude of situations. Now you’ll be able to see statistics on the performance of your collections in the same way you can already with Category Analytics.

The new Collections Analytics tab is available from within the Analytics section of the dashboard, beneath the Browse tab. Scroll down to see the table of all of your collections.

Clicking into a collection will show a detailed analysis, including pageviews and clickthrough rates, as well as facet usage for the collection using the same layout you’re already used to with Category Analytics.

In addition, we’re changing the way we show analytical data in graphs, by switching from the smoothed-out method to a more representative “jagged” line graph method. Your underlying data remains the same and is unaffected, but the new method will do an even better job of showing an accurate representation of the performance of your product discovery experience.

Here’s what the graphs used to look like:

And here’s how they look now:

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

Merchandisers and business users can now reference a collection (just like a category or other attribute) in a quiz within the results. 

This will be great in scenarios where you might be looking for ways to build quizzes that don’t align well with current attributes you have in your product data - whether it be due to a lack of data or you’re looking to build a quiz not based on your traditional attribute data. With Constructor’s newly released functionality, you’ll be able to put a list of items into a collection and then reference it in as a quiz option. You can also then build other logic within the quiz on top of it just as you might with a category and generally use collections as building blocks to increase their usefulness and give yourself more flexibility in quiz design. 

Maybe you want to build a quiz to help someone find their perfect wine, but you only currently categorize them into red or white wines. Now, using collections you could create groupings based on their varietal and then use those collections to better match your customer preferences to the right products. 

Collections to power result logic within the Quiz builder experience.

This all builds on our philosophy that all product discovery is connected, and that every part of it should make the other parts more helpful and easier to use, both for your shoppers and for merchandisers and business users.

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

The Abandoned in Cart strategy is now available for merchandisers and marketers to leverage in campaigns to help shoppers complete their purchase. The strategy recommends items that shoppers have added to their cart but have not purchased yet. This strategy reengages shoppers back into their previous shopping trips in key places like the homepage or a shopper account page. Additionally, email campaigns are one of the most powerful ways to leverage this strategy. If shoppers have left items in their cart, send them reminders to come back and complete their purchase. Good retailers don't let a conversion opportunity slip and now its easier than ever using Constructor Recommendations to introduce these abandoned products back to shoppers when they return to site!

Merchandisers can preview strategy results (see image below) in the preview module by selecting a shopper profile to impersonate: 

The strategy is available in the recommendations strategies list. It can be added to any new pod or replace any strategy in an existing pod. Please note that this strategy stores items added to cart but not purchased over the last thirty days and up to twenty items.

For more information, please review our recommendations strategies zendesk article, connect with your Customer Success Manager, or contact us through support@constructor.io.

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.