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.

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. 

Quizzes are often highly experiential in nature and building out quizzes with that experience in mind can be tricky before you are able to see it come to life to make sure it is just as you envisioned - until now. 

We’re excited to announce the release of our quiz preview experience so that merchandisers can get a sense of what the quiz they are building out will be like before it is rendered on their site. This will allow merchandisers to make edits and adjustments and validate them in real time directly in the dashboard. 

Preview can be found in the top right next to the “save” button.

Example generic preview experience.

Within the preview merchandisers be able to validate all content (including copy and images), the quiz flow through different combinations of questions and answers, and the results returned at the end of the quiz for a given flow in a generic preview experience. 

For more information about Quizzes, check out our product page, connect with your Customer Success Manager, or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Power ecommerce product search and product discovery with Constructor and integrate with Akeneo for automated product catalog data updates.

We make the process of building and maintaining integration with Constructor even easier for Akeneo PIM customers. Introducing Constructor Connect for Akeneo – the App on Akeneo App Store, that makes it easy to connect and upload your Akeneo product catalog to Constructor. 

Now you can integrate all product data from Akeneo to power Constructor solutions, identify optimization opportunities, and empower your ecommerce team in real-time:

• In just a few clicks, connect your Akeneo catalogs for ingestion to Constructor (categories, products, and variations included)
• Done-for-you integration: no need to rely on engineering resources or third-party apps
• Up and running: integrate your product data in as little as the same business day 
• View catalog ingestion status anytime on the Constructor dashboard

Use our visual dashboard to validate your product data within the Constructor platform.

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

Building on top of our recent release of the quizzes builder within the dashboard, we’re already making improvements upon it to provide even greater flexibility in creating quiz experiences. 

Quizzes are often highly curated and immersive experiences which usually means including beautiful imagery to support the story telling that you are looking to achieve by incorporating a quizzes experience within your product discovery journey. This can look like having images that provide visual reference to the options you might be presenting, or a beautiful background image right at the start of your quiz to help set the mood and immerse a user within a quiz experience. 

Images to further convey the tasting note options within a guided coffee quiz experience. 

We’ve always supported images within our quiz experience, but now we’ve made it even easier by adding support for them directly in the dashboard on all question and option types. Any externally hosted asset (including images) can be added into a quiz, and can be adjusted at any time without needing to make changes to the rendering of the quiz. 

“Add an asset” for both the question and the option level on a multi-select question type.

Asset editor screen where you can reference in the hosted asset URL, alt text for accessibility and add a secondary asset if desired.

For more information about Quizzes, check out our product page, connect with your Customer Success Manager, or contact us through support@constructor.io.

Merchandisers have been relying on impressions and click-through rates (CTR) as a measure to determine the success of recommendation strategies, and while helpful, they necessitate additional metrics to make critical business decisions. Now, add-to-carts (ATC) and add-to-cart rates (ATCR) are available in recommendation analytics so merchandisers can more accurately measure performance. The ATC analytics are available on overall recommendations performance and on specific pods.

Add-to-cart analytics provides new insights and analysis not available before. For example, merchandisers can create two PDP pods, one using the complementary strategy and one using the alternative strategy. After allowing each one to run alongside each other or with split traffic, merchandisers can compare the impact on clicks and add-to-carts to determine which strategy performs better for their desired business KPI. These comparative and pre/post analyses drive additional insights for optimizing your recommendations implementation!

For more information on recommendations strategies, analytics, or any additional feedback, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io. 

Today we’re expanding our suite of searchandizing capabilities and adding a brand new type of searchandizing rule to the set - content in search! 

Generic preview of content in search within the Searchandizing view.

With this new rule type merchandisers will be able to add all kinds of contextually relevant content to their search experiences 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. 

While content in search is meant to be open-ended for many creative uses, here are some ways this capability could be used: 

In-cart Discounts -

For example, maybe you have an in-cart discount on Samsung dishwashers and are looking for ways to communicate this in your product listing. Adding a banner to this experience that communicates that Samsung products are further discounted in-cart is immensely helpful information to a shopper who knows they want a new dishwasher, but hasn’t decided on a brand yet and this information would influence what products they went on to look at deeper in the funnel. 

Special Messaging - 

Maybe you have keen shoppers searching for the next rumored hot product release before you have it up on your site but you want to let them know that you’ll be carrying it and maybe even when to check back to snag it. Being able to communicate this helps let your shoppers know that you understand their intent and that you are the right destination for what they’re looking for. 

Content in Search is available as a new rule type within Searchandizing and includes a variety of commonly needed fields for this type of content. All fields are optional meaning that you can mix and match for exactly what you need. 

New rule type for Content added to Searchandizing options. 

All rendering logic will be handled on your site so you will be able to control the ultimate look and feel of any experience you build - ensuring a seamless experience for your users.. 

Right now this capability is available for query level Search Searchandizing rules, with plans to add Browse Searchandizing rules on categories and collections in the future.

For more information about this capability, check out our documentation here, connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io.

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.