As we continue to improve our A/B Testing capabilities, making sure that it remains easy and intuitive to use is especially important. With that in mind, we’re pleased to show you the latest set of updates.

To start with, we’ve improved the flow when setting up a test so that it’s easier to see the rules you can select, rather than popping them up in front of the rest of the configuration.

Continuing with the test setup page, we’ve added the ability to specify the percentage of your customers you want to see your test experience. As you can see in the above image, traffic splits from 5 to 95 percent can be chosen in 5 percent increments, so that you can carefully control the audience size for high-impact changes.

The chosen traffic split is also visible in the report page, as well as the tests listing page. Speaking of which, we’ve separated completed tests from those that are still running, so that it’s easier to find the tests you’re most interested in.

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

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.

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.

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.

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