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. 

We’ve long provided multiple ways for customers to update their catalogue and ensure that we always have the most recent data with which to provide an amazing product discovery experience for end users. These methods include HTTPS (REST), FTPS, and a synchronous Items API (V1, also REST).

Now, we’re excited to tell you about our all-new asynchronous Items API (V2) that allows you to send in your updates and then check a Tasks API to get status updates on their progress.

The new V2 API has a number of benefits:

• Ability to send up to 1,000 entries in a single call, allowing for real time updates of many thousands of products per second.
• Extended open data structure for increased flexibility in the data you can send us and how it’s sent.
• Direct interoperability with the Constructor dashboard, so updates sent via the V2 API appear in the dashboard and are viewable and auditable in the Integration tab there so you can easily check what you’ve sent, when it was sent, and what its status is.
• Deterministic, FIFO processing, so updates are processed in exactly the order you send them.

For customers with systems that already send out regular product updates this will be the preferred method of integration since it will be easier and more efficient to connect to and develop against. We recommend that it is combined with a daily full catalogue sync via the HTTPS or FTPS methods.

Example request:

Sample item JSON payload:

Instead of needing to wait for the response to tell you when the update is successfully accepted, you will now receive a task ID in the response:

You can call the Tasks API with the ID to check the progress:

We also have an asynchronous V2 Variations API for variation updates, and PATCH methods for both APIs to allow you to send us just the fields that have changed.

For full documentation on these new APIs see here.

Stay tuned for DELETE methods for both APIs, coming soon!

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

One of our key focuses is to ensure that the APIs customers use are always fast and efficient. To that end, we have introduced a parameter that will allow users of the search, browse and autocomplete APIs to specify which attributes are included in the variations response, enabling you to reduce the size of the payload and shave valuable milliseconds off your page load times. For users with slower connections (e.g. a cell phone with just one bar) that can mean results hundreds of milliseconds faster, the difference between now and an eternity in the world of ecommerce.

Want to display a price range on your products on your product listing page? No problem, you can add the variations_map parameter to your browse API request with the following JSON to only show an aggregated price range for all variation groups under each item (this example has a price field within the data object; your structure may be different):

Now instead of the entire variation object structure, you will receive the following in the response for each item:

There are many ways to customise these calls to get just what you need. Documentation for this new parameter can be found here.

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

Facet Option Sort in the Dashboard

We’ve long supported the ability to configure Facet Option sorting using the API, and now it is available in the dashboard for all users to modify. 

There are three options available to sort facets at the option level, these include: 

• Query Attractiveness
• Alphanumeric
• Number of Matches

While we generally recommend that Facet Options are sorted by Query Attractiveness (default) to help ensure the most attractive option is surfaced, we know there might be times when a different configuration could make sense too. 

Maybe you want to set a heuristic with customers for specific facets so they can more easily find the option that best suits their needs. This could mean setting a size facet alphanumerically so all the numbers show in order, or maybe you want to clearly show customers how the results of a given query are spread across various brand options by ranking them by how many products are available from each brand, you could sort them by number of matches. 

This can be found in the Manage Facets section of the dashboard, within the Indexes tab.  

New Documentation

We also made some changes to the documentation available in the dashboard. Previously there was just one link to “Docs” which took users to docs.constructor.io which is primarily our API documentation which is more technically focused.

We also have more merchandiser focused documentation available throughout the dashboard from relevant touchpoints, but we’ve never provided a generic link into all of that documentation from one place - until now!

New in the header you’ll find that we’ve renamed our existing documentation link from “Docs” to “API Docs” to make it more clear what those are, and we’ve added a new link to our more business friendly documentation in the “Knowledgebase” link. 

Continuing to ensure our services are resilient and easy to use is one of our commitments to our customers. 

Sometimes you just need to be able to quickly check if an API is responding, without implementing an expensive call. To that end, we have introduced a series of health check endpoints for our products. Now you can make a fast, lightweight call just to verify the status.

The following endpoints have been implemented:

• Search: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/search
• Autocomplete: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/autocomplete
• Browse: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/browse
• Recommendations: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/recommendations
• Collections: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/product/collections
• Ingestion: https://ac.cnstrc.com/status/ingestion

If the API is up and running, you will get back an OK status message:

Further documentation on these endpoints can be found here:

• Search: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/search/queries#system-status
• Autocomplete: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/autocomplete_queries#system-status
• Browse: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/browse/queries#system-status
• Recommendations: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/recommendations#system-status
• Collections: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/collections/#system-status
• Ingestion: https://docs.constructor.io/rest_api/full_catalog#system-status

Merchandisers can now block products in search and browse results with a few simple steps in Constructor.io’s global searchandizing rule creation menu. 

Global blocklist allows for hiding products from results without needing to re-upload a full catalog. Use cases include quickly blocking products when there is a mistake in the catalog that leads to out-of-stock products returned in results or incorrect pricing. Additionally, products can now be globally blocklisted for a specific user segment, allowing for customizable results that meet targeted merchandising needs in business-to-business search. Finally, global blocklisting can allow adding products to the catalog in advance of launch and availability in results, a feature that will be improved upon in future releases.

Creating a global blocklist rule

Global blocklisting rules will remove the selected items from search or browse results based on the rule creation’s criteria. Global blocklist rules are created by inputting specific criteria, such as: selecting specific items to block, setting a start or stop time, selecting catalog attributes to block as a group, and/or setting the rule to apply to specific customer segments. 

Where to add the blocklist rule

Navigate to the searchandizing 'add rule menu' and click the 'add global' link at the bottom of the add new rule pop up. The option to create global blocklist rules is at the bottom of the global rule creation page, as seen above.

Types of Blocklist Rule Criteria

Specific items can be added individually to the global blocklist rule. Additionally, merchandisers can block entire groups of items by adding item groups based on catalog filters such as category, brand, or any other catalog attributes available. 

Specify blocklist rules to match time and segment needs

Once item criteria has been specified for a global blocklist rule, the rule can include specific start and stop time-boxing or be apply only to a subset of customer segments. For example, a rule could stay in effect until a designated product launch date whereupon the product is no longer blocked. Additionally, users have the option to set the rule for only a specific customer segment. Click ‘add’ and the new rule will apply across all search and browse results. 

As we continue to improve and enhance the tools available to make your users’ searches more effective, we have released the latest addition to Cognitive Embeddings Search. We now include an object in the search API response indicating how many of the products in the result set are delivered by Cognitive Embeddings Search (embeddings_match) and how many by our token-based KPI-optimizing search (token_match).

Read more about the response format here.

Now you’ll be able to further customize your experience for users. For example, you can add help text on your search page to let your users know that while they might not have received exact match results for their search, they are seeing results that are the next best thing. This lets you turn what could have been a lost customer into a purchase.

This capability is now enabled for all customers. If you are not using Cognitive Embeddings Search today and you’d like to learn more, please connect with your Customer Success Manager or contact us through support@constructor.io

Recently we released the ability for users to hide and order facets at a category level (you can read more about that here). 

This allowed users to set category contextual facets for an improved end user experience, but it was not always obvious which facets were slotted already in the global facet configuration - until today! 

We have now released the ability for users to be able to identify which facet groups and facet options have a global facet configuration applied to them, indicated with the global icon. 

 In the example above “Discount” was locally slotted in spot 1 for this category, which pushed down the existing globally slotted facet groups.

We recently released Cognitive Embeddings Search which dramatically decreases the amount of zero-result queries and the manual effort needed to add synonyms and redirects to optimize low, or no result queries.

We’ve seen amazing results from this new capability in testing across our customer base: increased purchase conversion, increased autosuggest product selects and decreased the rate of search reformulation. 

In an effort to make search results more clear and obvious we’re excited to announce our latest capability - Cognitive Embedding Search in Interact within the Dashboard. 

Users will now be able to see what products in the result set are coming from Cognitive Embeddings Search, which are indicated with a unique icon. You’ll also be able to toggle Cognitive Embeddings Search on and off to preview the effect of it at the query level within Interact in the Dashboard. 

This capability is now enabled for all customers that have Cognitive Embeddings Search enabled. If you are not using it today and you’d like to learn more please connect with your Customer Success Manager or through support@constructor.io

As part of our commitment to improve and optimize performance we're excited to announce that we’ve significantly improved performance of search for customers with the largest catalogs.

More specifically, the slowest 10% of queries (p90) saw a 10% improvement in response times, while the slowest 1% (p99) saw a 15% improvement in response times. 

For customers with catalogs of millions of items, the improvement was more than 50%! All of this means an overall improved experience for customers on your site, decreased time-to-checkout and higher conversion rates.