At Constructor, we take pride in our glassbox solutions, which means we want you to see and understand how our algorithms work for each individual user and how they impact your business. Driven by this commitment to transparency, we are excited to introduce a significant enhancement to the Impersonate feature in Interact – the advanced User Profiles.

To make product discovery truly personalized, we need to collect diverse data about each user. These data points include the user's location, device type, cumulative revenue, recent search and browse history, viewed items, cart contents, and completed purchases. With the new User Profile, merchandisers get the ability to explore a user's unique journey and dive deep into their interactions and personalization factors in an easy-to-understand visual experience. 

Now when you pick a user and step into their “digital shoes” using Constructor’s Impersonate feature, it's easier than ever to see how their preferences and behaviors directly impact product rankings.

Additionally, for each user, our algorithms detect and display affinities towards products. This helps to understand why products with a specific attribute were ranked higher for a particular user.

The Impersonate feature is available in your dashboard within the Interact section. To use it, simply enter any search query, and click on the "Personal Attractiveness" toggle in the left sidebar. You'll then see a list of profiles through which you can view the search results as if you were the user behind the "eyes".

We believe that this enhancement helps merchandisers make better-informed decisions and provides transparency to better understand our personalization algorithms. As always, your feedback is crucial in helping us refine and improve our products. Feel free to reach out to your dedicated Customer Success representative or contact us at support@constructor.io if you have any questions.

Being able to monitor the performance of your product discovery experience is very important as you fine-tune and optimise to get the best out of Constructor for your customers and your business. To that end, we’re excited to announce that we now have revenue metrics available in the dashboard. These can be seen in the dashboard homepage as soon as you log in.

We’re starting with Search and you will now be able to see Total Revenue, Revenue per Visitor and Average Order Value at the top of the new layout graph, along with all the other metrics you’re already familiar with.

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

We're thrilled to announce the launch of a powerful new feature: Variation Slicing. This enhancement to our API allows you to better present the diverse variations of your products, grouping them in the ways that feel most correct to you, and being able to do so differently depending on the context. You’ve told us this would improve the overall product discovery experience for your end users, and we’ve heard you. 

Traditionally, different variations of the same product (e.g., different colors or sizes of a T-shirt) would be bundled together as a single item, or separated as all separate items, without much wiggle room in between. However, with the Variation Slicing feature, you can now split these variations and present them as distinct items or in distinct groups (e.g. separated by material, by groups of colors, by sale status, or any other grouping you think makes sense for you). 

For instance, let's say you have a T-shirt line available in various colors - red, blue, and green, as well as different styles - v-neck, round neck, and polo. With Variation Slicing, you can decide how these variations show up in search results and categories. If a customer searches for 'red v-neck t-shirts,' you can choose to display only the red v-necks as separate items, each with its unique size variations. But if the query is just 'v-neck t-shirts,' you can group all v-neck T-shirts of different colors together, while still separating them from round necks and polos.

Similarly, if a customer is looking for 'blue t-shirts,' you can split all blue T-shirts (irrespective of the style) from the other colors, presenting all blue t-shirts as individual items. In each scenario, you're optimizing your display based on the search context, effectively enhancing user experience. 

Variation Slicing enables you to enrich your product discovery process and add variety to categories. It provides you an avenue to highlight new or trending product variations, offering an even more exciting and richer shopping journey for your users. This feature heightens your product presentation, offering an unmatched level of flexibility for both search results and category groups.

Let's walk through an example:

To set a Variation Slicing rule, you would use the following API request:
Example request:

Sample item JSON payload:

Once this rule is set, each color variation of an item would be displayed as a separate result in the autocomplete, search, or browse responses.

As always, we recommend using Variation Slicing in conjunction with your other update routines to ensure that your catalog remains consistent and accurate.

We hope that this new feature will empower you to customize your catalog display to better meet the needs of your customers. For more detailed instructions on how to use Variation Slicing, please refer to our general description of variation slicing and to adding variation slicing rules to refined entities documentation.

We're looking forward to sharing more updates and improvements with you in the near future. If you have any questions or require further assistance with this new feature, please feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us at support@constructor.io.

Searchandising Campaigns, one of our most highly anticipated and requested features is here! 

Searchandising Campaigns is an efficient way to create searchandising rules for multiple queries at once. With this, we’re introducing a new and improved query selector which will provide merchandisers the ability to search and select multiple queries at once. In the image below, you can see the new query selection window to create a campaign. 

All existing searchandising rule types are available within Searchandising Campaigns, so with this release, you can set up content in search or create special event promos around a group of queries with greater efficiency.

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

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the new and improved Constructor Salesforce Cartridge, which is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange!

The Constructor Salesforce Cartridge allows Salesforce Commerce Cloud users to configure automatic ingestion of product, pricing and inventory data into Constructor in just a few steps. Joint customers experience an impressive acceleration of their time to value, going live up to 4x faster with the Constructor Salesforce Cartridge. Your integration can be set up as quickly as the same business day of the Cartridge installation.

Learn how integration is made even easier for SFCC users with the Constructor Connect Cartridge for B2C Commerce:

• Index your Salesforce Commerce Cloud products, variations and groups into Constructor’s powerful search, autosuggest, browse, recommendations, quizzes, collections, and attribute enrichment tools.
• Configure personalized data ingestion strategies in a couple of clicks right from your Salesforce instance.
• Customize your Cartridge to your unique needs, with flexible data transformation possibilities that support even the most complex eCommerce integration use cases.
• Compatible with SFRA Storefront implementation: The Constructor cartridge works in conjunction with any frontend framework, including SFRA, Salesforce’s innovative reference architecture, to power the ultimate search and discovery experience.
• Developer-friendly, with automated product updates that eliminate the need for any manual maintenance, update controls, or patches, as well as full visibility on your catalog ingestion status anytime on the Constructor dashboard.

Watch the tutorial below for a step-by-step guide on how to set up your integration using the Constructor Connect Cartridge for B2C Commerce:

Check out the app listing on Salesforce AppExchange and read our documentation to learn more. 

If you have any questions about the Constructor.io Salesforce Cartridge or how to get started with integration, don't hesitate to reach out to partners@constructor.io.

We are excited to announce the Matched Terms feature that will further enhance the transparency of our machine learning algorithms and provide insights to merchandisers.

Merchandisers have provided feedback that it can be challenging to locate the matched word when products are returned in search results, as it requires manually scanning lengthy lists of synonyms or adjusting other settings. Now, with our new feature, you will be able to see the matched terms for each search query, giving you greater insight into why a particular item was returned within the result set. You can find this information in the tooltip when hovering over an item’s Attractiveness Score, as well as on the ranking tab in the card in the sidebar.

The matched terms will appear in the following possible types: exact match if the term is an exact match to the query entered by the user; original terms if the term is included in the original query or term, but not an exact match; synonyms if the term is a synonym to the original query or term; corrected from original terms if the term has been corrected from the original query or term; acronyms if the term is an acronym to the original query or term.

We understand that for a single term, there could be more than one matched term type, which can confuse. To address this, we have implemented a priority system for matched term types. When multiple matched term types are found for a single term, only the type with the highest priority will be displayed. The priority order for matched term types is as follows:

1. Exact match to query
2. Included in original query/term
3. Synonym to original query/term
4. Corrected from original query/term
5. Acronym to original query/term

This priority system ensures that you are shown the most relevant matched term type for each term, based on its priority level.

Our new matched term explainability helps merchandisers make better informed Searchandising decisions and provides transparency to better comprehend our results system.

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

Recommendations Searchandising has a revamped navigation that makes rules easier to manage and navigate. The condensed rules list makes it easier for merchandisers to search or scan for seed items or attributes that are affected by rules. Additionally, helpful information like the number of rules attached to each item or attribute, and when the rule was last modified are included in the rule summary. Last modified is a sortable field that helps merchandisers find the rules most recently modified or sort in reverse to find the oldest rules. In the image below, you can see the new rules list view in a representative complementary strategy:

Recommendations Searchandising rules can also be edited from this view. To edit a rule, click the small edit icon to see the familiar Recommendations rule interface to add, edit, or remove rule effects.

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 Facet Page Analytics.

A facet page is an efficient way to present a filtered page of products to your customers that you can searchandise. Now, you’ll be able to see statistics on the performance of your facet pages in the same way you can already with Category Analytics and Collection Analytics. You will only see data populated here if you’re using this page type, commonly used for brand page experiences or as an alternative to more traditional group hierarchy.

The new Facets 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 facet pages.

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

And while we’re on the topic of facet analytics, if you’re curious to see metrics on how your customer facing filters (facets) are performing, you can see that in the Facets section of the dashboard by category or collection. 

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

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.