Search by Algolia
What is online retail merchandising? An introduction
e-commerce

What is online retail merchandising? An introduction

Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness
e-commerce

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness

It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising
e-commerce

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising

What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results

In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality

In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges

Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...

Alita Leite da Silva

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs
ai

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs

Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

What is digital product merchandising?
e-commerce

What is digital product merchandising?

How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Scaling marketplace search with AI
ai

Scaling marketplace search with AI

It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...

Bharat Guruprakash

Chief Product Officer

The changing face of digital merchandising
e-commerce

The changing face of digital merchandising

This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...

Reshma Iyer

Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?
ai

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?

A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?
product

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?

How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store
engineering

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store

Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...

Ashley Huynh

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization
e-commerce

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization

Algolia sponsored the 2023 Ecommerce Site Search Trends report which was produced and written by Coleman Parkes Research. The report ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search
ai

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search

You think your search engine really is powered by AI? Well maybe it is… or maybe not.  Here’s a ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?
ai

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?

You looked at this scarf twice; need matching mittens? How about an expensive down vest? You watched this goofy flick ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?
ai

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?

“I can’t find it.”  Sadly, this conclusion is often still part of the modern enterprise search experience. But ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Looking for something?

Building a better iStyles shopping experience with Algolia search
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

iStyles, a fashion accessories provider for consumer electronics, boasts more than 200K products and 1600 designs, as well as support for over 800 devices. With the already large and constantly growing number of products offered, iStyles needs their customers to be able to find what they want quickly and easily. That’s where we come in. Here’s the scoop on how iStyles uses technology, including Algolia, to provide the best shopping experience for their customers.

The iStyles story

iStyles was originally formed in 1997 as a web development firm that offered web services and built applications and e-commerce infrastructure for companies worldwide. As such, iStyles has always been a technology company at its core and continually evaluates and leverages the best tech out there to provide an optimal shopping experience.

In 2004, after acquiring some product distribution contacts, iStyles decided to make their e-commerce store the main focus of the company and has since grown the business into the fashion accessories provider it is today.

The e-commerce challenge

The market has become very competitive over the years, and it is increasingly difficult to attract new customers in a saturated marketplace. iStyles needs to stand out from the crowd and prove to customers why we are a much better place to shop than Amazon or other online or brick-and-mortar retailers. We have built a loyal base of customers over the years but still have to continually work hard to attract new ones through marketing and other innovations.

When we first launched in 2004, we based the store on an existing e-commerce platform. The problem with using a popular e-commerce platform is that your competitors can (and will) deploy stores using the same platform. There’s no innovation—no differentiator. The other problem we faced was the rigidity of such e-commerce platforms. One size may fit many, but it will not fit all. If you need to present or link products more meaningfully or have better control over your search results, you have no choice but to customize the solution.

The technical difficulties of customization

A good e-commerce store allows customers to explore the product range available and get to what they need or want quickly and easily. We know the significant role a search engine plays in this process, but the custom search algorithms we developed to overcome the limitations of the default e-commerce platform search engine were inadequate. It was very difficult to build both speed and flexibility.

Performance is an important part of the shopping experience, and we are obsessed with making things faster, but it was a large technical hurdle as our product range and traffic grew. Searches on our previous search engine took as long as 2 to 3 seconds for basic searches. It honestly sometimes feels like we’re trying to overcome the limits of physics. And let’s be real, a good search engine is so much more complicated than simply presenting precisely matching results. We didn’t have the resources or time to build another Google from scratch.

How can we have great search with our limited resources?

We needed a search engine that would return relevant results quickly and present them clearly. We also needed better control over result ranking, a way to allow for typos and the ability to match on synonyms. So we started looking. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to deploy “really awesome search functionality” without having to re-invent the wheel or have more back-end infrastructure to worry about.

Exactly what we were looking for—Algolia

iStyles implementation - e-commerce site searchWe signed on for and evaluated trial accounts on several search services, but Algolia quickly emerged as the obvious choice during our 14-day trial period. We were impressed most by the comprehensive documentation and feature set.

We designed and built our new Algolia powered search functionality from the ground up and were thrilled it took us less than a week to do so thanks to the excellent Algolia documentation and easy to use Search API clients.

Our front-end is now powered by Algolia’s JavaScript Search API and custom scripts that tie everything together. We keep the search indexes updated via their PHP API at the back-end.

It works, it really works!

Search performance is critical for us, and we’re glad to say that Algolia exceeds our expectations. There is something to be said when search performance improves from 3 seconds to 0.03 seconds. Search results are now virtually instant—they are so fast that we can update results as the user types.
With this virtually instant response, our user search experience was completely transformed. The search is a pleasure to use, and the engine returns more relevant results as we are able to index more comprehensive data with no loss in performance and have more control over how results are presented.

Algolia Isn’t just a simple search bar either. Users can search for anything they want in the search bar and narrow down the selection easily via the filter options (facets) in the left column. These facets also update virtually instantly based on what the user selects and/or types.

Users can now get to what they want more quickly and in fewer steps. We have no doubt that the Algolia search implementation was part of the reason why our conversion rates this year are consistently higher than last year’s.

We’re planning on building new sections on iStyles, and it’s likely that these new areas will be powered by Algolia at the backend.

We think you should give it a try

As developers, we are always trying to build better products. One way to do so is leveraging the great technology available to us. When we started the project to revamp the iStyles search functionality, our main aim was to allow customers to search more effectively. Algolia enabled us to not only build really good search functionality, but also essentially build a whole new way to experience iStyles.

There are options out there that may better suit some projects depending on the resources you want to throw into it, but if you’re looking for a fast, flexible and reliable backend that you can use to build your dream search engine, give Algolia a try.

About the author
Guillaume Dumortier

Algolia documentation

It's extensive, clear, and, of course, searchable.

Read the docs
Algolia documentation

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

How to optimize your e-commerce site search
e-commerce

Louise Vollaire

Product Marketing Manager

The (almost) ultimate guide to site search
product

Ivana Ivanovic

Senior Content Strategist

How to create the best search engine experience
ux

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer