Search by Algolia
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algolia

Introducing new developer-friendly pricing

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VP of Product Growth

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e-commerce

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Eye-catching mannequins. Bright, colorful signage. Soothing interior design. Exquisite product displays. In short, amazing store merchandising. For shoppers in ...

Catherine Dee

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Introducing the new Algolia no-code data connector platform
engineering

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Customer-centric site search trends
e-commerce

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Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

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

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e-commerce

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

Piyush Patel

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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

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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

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Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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

Looking for something?

How Beyond Retro Improved Its Ecommerce Site with Algolia’s Magento Plugin

Sep 30th 2015 customers

How Beyond Retro Improved Its Ecommerce Site with Algolia’s Magento Plugin
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Editor’s Note: Jascha McDonald is Software Developer and Application Architect for BankVogue, North America’s trusted partner in buying, selling and shipping used goods around the world. One of their companies includes Beyond Retro, a vintage clothing retailer in Europe.

Founded in London in 2002, Beyond Retro’s stores offer an exhilarating pick ‘n’ mix of vibrant 20th century fashion. Led by an inspiring team of true originals, the staff are the beating heart of a creative community that spans from England to Sweden with verve and style. Beyond Retro’s retail network recycles upwards of 500,000 items each year. Purchased directly or indirectly from charities, they’re part of a global movement that brings new purpose to excess clothing and accessories.

Beyond Retro’s Magento-powered global site offers more than 35,000 objects with a twist: they’re all unique pieces! We asked them how they managed to deal with such a difficult constraint.

Algolia: What technical challenges have you faced building Beyond Retro?

Jascha: Since almost all Beyond Retro product is one-of-a-kind vintage there are many difficulties we faced when breaking into the e-commerce world. All items need to be photographed and classified individually. When a garment sells it immediately needs to be removed from the site.

Products being constantly added and removed from the catalogue caused us incredible headaches in terms of balancing website performance and an up to date catalogue. Our products are so varied that most search architectures were not sufficient or returned results too slowly.

To that extent, Magento’s built-in search was not effective and Magento Catalogue had performance issues with our limited computing budgetFiltering through products was slow, hindering our customers ability to find the right product for them. There had to be a better solution than the built-in Magento tools or the Manadev navigation we were using.

A: What did you do about it?

J: Our technical agenda was very clear: we needed to find a replacement for our search to better help customers find product faster. We also needed to speed up the site as the queries took too much time to process.

As were originally looking only for a search replacement, we quickly found out that many were very expensive. We discovered Algolia be a recommendation from an SEO consultant. This was originally suggested to us as just a search replacement but after experimenting with the product we decided that it would be an effective catalogue replacement as well.

Algolia’s price point is great and its speed beat all competitors we benchmarked. The free trial was also a great incentive as it gave us the ability to test the integration before deciding. Integration was straightforward and well documented and developers on Github helped us resolve small technical glitches.

A: What changes have you noticed ?

J:  Speed was already a decisive factor for us to implement Algolia. It directly impacted the customer experience on our site. Algolia is insanely fast, it’s almost like it reaches into the future to get your search results. Before, we would have periods in the day when some pages would take up to 10 seconds to generate the HTML.

Now, we are averaging about 60 milliseconds with a more stable performance across the board. We also lowered the average server response time from 0.9 to 0.55 seconds. Server performance has been drastically increased and the load spikes we used to see have disappeared. Better yet, the whole implementation eventually saved us about 30% on our infrastructure costs.

There was also an unexpected benefit to implement Algolia as our search. It allowed us to turn off Magento Full Page Cache invalidation for category pages, a major improvement for Beyond Retro’s site performance.

A: How did you proceed ?

J:  It took about 1 month to roll out the full Algolia catalog replacement. First, we installed Algolia’s Magento plugin and iterated with the help of the documentation and the Github community. We then applied our customized theme, tested it and rolled it out. It was a very straightforward process. We are now working on increasing the usability of our search with Synonyms and the other search features available to us.

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About the author
Guillaume Dumortier

Build the ultimate search for your Magento store

Make it faster, more relevant and conversion-oriented.

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Alex Kudelka - Business DevelopmentRaphael Terrier - Education Engineer
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Alex KudelkaBusiness Development
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Raphael TerrierEducation Engineer
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