New features

Single Sign on (SSO) Early Access We support Single Sign-On for our admin dashboard! This is in early access with a limited set of customers, but will become available more broadly in the future depending on plan subscription. Initial support is targeted towards Okta as the identity provider, but will expand based on demand. Reach out to your account or CS manager if you'd like to be added to the waitlist!

Top search, zero result and browse report export! Reports can now be generated for the top search terms, top zero result terms and top categories to facilitate outside analysis and stakeholder reporting! These reports include key metrics like views, clicks and click-through rates, joining our existing reports for top purchases.

Advanced Japanese language support Similar to our release of Chinese language support in March, we have added advanced Japanese language search support. Since Japanese has no (or very few) spaces between words, splitting product names and user queries into searchable components (tokens) is non-trivial. We have added special dedicated models to our search algorithms to handle this process (known as 'tokenization')

We are expanding aggressively around the world and our cutting-edge language modeling for languages that present unique challenges, such as Chinese and Japanese (tokenization) and Dutch and German (compounding / decompounding) is an important component of this strategy. If you're interested in expanding language support, reach out to your customer success manager!

Self-service for API values

• Displayable field configuration We now allow dashboard users to configure which fields will be returned by the API. Navigate to the index configuration and choose "Manage Searchability & Displayability"

• Remove searchandizing options that no longer exist in results Searchandizing rules may be set in a category or search result page, then products with these attributes go out of stock or otherwise leave the catalog. We want to preserve these rules so if products matching the rules return to the catalog, we continue to map them as expected, but we now make it more clear when there are rules which no longer correspond to products in the search or browse page -- and make it easy to remove these rules.
  
• Populate names and images in recommendations merchandizing We now show product names and images in the recommendations merchandizing interface to simplify the process of editing manual recommendations merchandizing rules.
• Pointer consistency Use pointer for clickable items consistently in dashboard.
• Filter padding in collections edit interface Filters no longer overflow in the collections edit interface when editing rules at the bottom of the page.

Dashboard performance

• Optimized performance for collections page In certain cases large numbers of facets could slow down the collections page. We now lazy-load facets and options to accelerate the collection creation experience.

Recommendations merchandizing!

• We now support recommendation merchandizing in the dashboard for alternative or complementary strategies!
  
• Our initial release here focuses on hiding specific items when requesting recommendations for another item, but these capabilities will expand in the future.
• Fundamentally, we are committed to algorithmic optimization of KPIs across search, browse, recommendations and the entire product suite. That said, we recognize that customers want to intervene if they see an opportunity to improve and want to and that some customers may not have as much behavioral data as others (though we are working here as well - see below!). 

Recommendations UX improvements

• Additional recommendation strategy preview support We expanded preview capabilities in the dashboard to include query and bestseller recommendation strategies. This leaves just filtered items strategy without dashboard preview support (look for this soon).
  
• Prevent recommendation pod deletion We have restricted the deletion of recommendation pods with usage to admin users.
• Improved warning on recommendation pod deletion We now check for requests in the last 7 days for recommendation pods and present a warning before deletion.
  
  

Performance

• Collections dashboard performance imporvements We improved performance of collections edit page for customers with larger catalogs by over 50%. This is the first of a few dashboard performance improvements for customers with larger catalogs.

API

• The REST batch items update endpoint now accepts items without the item_name parameter if id is provided.
• Hide range buckets We now permit hiding a particular range bucket from numeric range facet fields in the facet configuration API. This allows customers to just show facet selection options for 3+, 4+ and 5 star reviews, hiding 1+ and 2+ star filters.
• Field presence summary & searchability API We launched a searchability API, which allows requesting all fields associated with items in the catalog, configuring which of these should be searchable and how these should be searched (exact or fuzzy). A forthcoming release will provide 

Result Fixes

• Facet count consistency In very rare cases, selecting a facet to narrow the results could lead to an increased number of results as spell correction was applied more aggressively for the narrower result set. This is now avoided in all cases.
• Trailing spaces in facets Fixed an issue that could cause facet with trailing spaces uploaded in certain situations to be parsed incorrectly.

Display Fixes

• Fixed a UX display bug in date selector.
• Fixed facet range display in the facet configuration dashboard overflowing if there were too many options.
• Filter selections are now maintained while paginating in interact.
• Align icons in interface when item is not found in catalog.

Slotting is a powerful tool to spotlight or feature products at the top of search or browse pages. However, when users filter down on results from a specific brand or in a particular price range, it's important to ensure the returned products match the provided filters.

We applied this logic to all search and browse pages, but certain collection pages didn't follow this same behavior - this release ensures we do this for all collections.