Improvements:

• Item boost rules in collections. Item boosts allow merchant teams to increase the rank of items dynamically without having to rigidly fix position with slotting. This feature has been available globally, as well as for specific browse and search contexts. With this release, the capability is available in Collections searchandizing as well!
  
  
• Disable fallback for recently viewed recommendation strategy. The recently viewed recommendation strategy provides an easy way to promote products a user viewed most recently, but several customers didn't want this to fallback to some other strategy, such as bestsellers. This is now possible - reach out to support@constructor.io or your customer success rep if you want to make this change.
• Catalog upload speed improvements. With more and more large customer catalogs in the millions of items, update speed is more important. A couple of related changes improved the speed of full (sync) catalog ingestion for customers using the FTP and HTTP catalog endpoints by 20-200%.
• Improved support for Chinese. Constructor has supported CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) languages and Right-to-left languages (Hebrew & Arabic) since our founding, but we recently released dramatic improvements for Chinese search to serve our growing Chinese-language customer base. Since Chinese lacks spaces between characters, it's critical to deduce which characters should be grouped together as logical 'words' when evaluating product matches. We now handle this inference when users query and also when analyzing historical user behavior to determine likely intent.

API Releases:

• Product data endpoint. Ever want to request product data from a lightning fast service with fraction of a second latency? This endpoint allows exactly that! Customers are using this endpoint to serve PDP traffic, product pods in various contexts across the site and more. Even better, filtering expressions are supported as well, allowing this endpoint to serve the correct price and availability information when the same index serves availability for several regions, or for Buy Online Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) use cases. Read more here.

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that prevented removing a fixed position for a facet option in the facet configuration page.
• Fixed a date mismatch where some analytics charts on a page would appear to be off by 1 day from the selected time range.
• Fixed link from dashboard homepage to merchant tools.