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?

Collaborative 3D Printing Made Possible by Pinshape, Search Powered by Algolia

Nov 16th 2015 customers

Collaborative 3D Printing Made Possible by Pinshape, Search Powered by Algolia
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

Pinshape, a collaborative 3D printing design community based in Vancouver, has made creating the top marketplace for 3D artists to sell and share their designs their focus because they know designers are fueling and inspiring the 3D revolution. But it’s not always easy to create a superior product and user experience with the limited resources of a startup. With the help of search powered by Algolia, Pinshape is now able to provide the truly collaborative website experience necessary for powering the 3D printing design community.

Who is Pinshape?

Pinshape is a global marketplace built to enable designers to collaborate on and share 3D printed designs, enabling downloads straight to a customer’s printer. We offer more than 10,000 unique 3D printing designs, all available to download or stream, and each design comes with step-by-step printing instructions so the person using the file prints the best possible product.

In 2014, Pinshape was accepted into 500 Startups, a startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, and the business really took off. Since then we’ve worked hard to build our website into a creative community with thousands of designs and collaborators from 130 countries around the world. Pinshape encourages collaboration to make 3D printing easier for people everywhere, and community and shared learning is part of our culture. We’ve got big plans, and we’re just getting started.

Why 3D printing?

When we founded Pinshape in 2013, 3D printing technology was still in its early stages. We kept hearing more and more about it and saw huge potential for the technology to have a global impact. We knew we wanted to be in the 3D printing industry, but we really had to narrow down what specific area to enter.

3D printed design - search UXWe didn’t have the technical skills to build 3D printers or the materials science background to innovate in the field, so we had to think of something else. After spending time in the 3D online community, we noticed a lack of quality printable content; for those who could not create their own designs, it was extremely difficult to find good 3D print files to download. Our solution—create a community and marketplace to connect 3D printer owners with 3D designers so that everyone can access great 3D print files.

3D Printing Industry Barriers

3D printing technology is still foreign to the general public. One of the most common questions we get is “sure it’s cool, but what do people actually print?”.  For 3D printing to reach mass adoption, the applications of the technology need to be clearer to consumers. Let’s be real, before Apple and Microsoft came along, no one really knew what to do with personal computers. Similarly, we need to show consumers the killer applications of 3D printing for them to realize its true potential.  

Another challenge is that the user experience of 3D printing is relatively complex. There are numerous steps and software programs required to get from idea to physical product, and there is a steep learning curve when it comes to actually using the printer because of the technical difficulties associated with running and maintaining a complicated piece of hardware.

We want to bring this technology mainstream by creating a place for makers and designers to share and explore quality content. We also help 3D printer owners get the best prints possible by providing printing instructions from the community.

The Importance of Search

For a printer or maker, the fun is in the printing, not searching for a specific design. Technical challenges aside, we want to make it easy and fast for users to find amazing designs to print. Since our site has so many different 3D print files to sort through, we need to provide a search experience that’s fast, easy to use, and powerful.

One of our challenges was creating a product and user experience that is superior to that of our competitors, but with the limited resources of a startup. Before Algolia, we were using a free tool called Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch had some great qualities, but it took a lot of time to manage and code. We ultimately needed a tool that managed tuning performance and the search ranking algorithms so that we could focus on UI and UX. We heard other startups were using Algolia to fine tune their search rankings, so we had a good idea that Algolia had the technology we needed.

Algolia’s Impact

With Algolia, our search load time is approximately 160% faster than with our previous search tool. Our users can now quickly find what they are looking for with filters that update without a page refresh. It makes our site more aesthetically appealing, and the autocomplete makes the search time even faster. We also love the Algolia analytics page that allows us to see popular searches so we can figure out exactly what our users are looking for. This gives us valuable insight into our design community. Since launching Algolia, our searches have increased by 91.23%, and our transactions have grown with it.

Since we were spending a lot of time on our search functions, we know there are others out there who are experiencing the same problem. We estimate that using Algolia instead of developing the search code internally has saved us at least two months of work.

With Algolia, we deliver improved search functionalities at a lightning quick speed. Searching has gone from a bit of a chore to something that’s delightful to use, and it keeps people coming back to find their next print, which is what Pinshape is all about.

Try Algolia free

Illustration by Justas Galaburda

About the author
Guillaume Dumortier

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Introducing our new navigation
product

Craig Williams

Director of Product Design & Research

Redesigning Our Docs - Part 3 - The UX/UI Phase
ux

Nicolas Meuzard

Product Designer

Deploying Algolia to Search on more than 2 Million Products
algolia

Maxime