Algolia Increases Online Search Sessions By 60% and Unique Mobile Searches by 270%

The following post is a guest post by Omar Kassim, co-founder of JadoPado.

Founded in 2010, JadoPado is one of the largest e-commerce sites servicing the GCC, Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.  Its CEO Omar Kassim wanted to bring an Amazon-like experience to the region.  In just 3 years of operations the company now boasts thousands of customers, hundreds of vendors and over $7 million in annual revenues.

Realizing that search is a key component of their user experience and engagement, Omar and his small team of 15 set off to build new search capabilities that would help users find the products they wanted, lightning fast. In addition, the team was developing a revamped mobile experience and saw that search needed to be spot on for both smartphones and tablets. “I saw search as a competitive tool and as a strategy to get a leg up on our competition.  After seeing Algolia on Hacker News I was absolutely blown away.  After looking at the demos, we threw out what we were doing internally in terms of a small search revamp and I had one of our team get cracking with Algolia right away. As a little startup, it really helped that Algolia’s price points were within reach in terms of not breaking the bank to get things rolling.”

The Power of Instant Search

After configuring and testing Algolia for two weeks, JadoPado had the results they were looking for. Branded internally as InstaSearch, JadoPado knew that it would dramatically improve how search functioned on both mobile and the web at JadoPado. “The idea from the outset was to build InstaSearch. I kept ending up at the Algolia demo and thought it would be incredible if we could forget all user interaction aside from typing and just display results right away. Remove what you’ve typed and the results disappear taking you back to where you were. We then spent a bit of time figuring out how to get each result “page” to have a URL that could be used with external search or shared elsewhere,” explained Omar.

Making Search Seamless

“We looked at a number of solutions. One of our biggest intentions was to try to get search to be extremely fast and as slick as possible. Customers should feel like search “just works” and that it is a super easy way to get straight to to whatever they may be looking for. Algolia has allowed us to accomplish that,” Omar explained.  “Moving search from a not really working internal model to a search as a service platform has allowed us to focus on other areas while knowing that search works and that we’ve got an edge over our competition.”

Support For Arabic

With more than 20 countries to support, the JadoPado team knew that the key to success in the region was to ensure that search be delivered in Arabic as well. Omar explained, “The final bits were figuring out a separate set of indexes for Arabic (as we were about to roll out a standalone Arabic version of JadoPado) and getting the faceting right. This was easy to do with the deep Algolia documentation.” Algolia works with all languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic. No specific configuration required, speed and ranking perform exactly the same way.

Better Business Through Search

In May the team rolled out InstaSearch, Arabic support and a newly revamped mobile experience with search at the center. JadoPado immediately experienced a doubling in conversions and activity that was triple a typical day. Compared to the same 30 day period in 2013, JadoPado saw an increase in site visits through search from 8.2% to 11.3%.

Additionally:

• Sessions with search has jumped 59.96%.
• Unique searches has jumped 46.87%
• Average search depth has increased by 58.87%.

Mastering Mobile Through Search

The greater impact of Algolia’s hosted search was JadoPado’s revamped mobile experience. Search is often the first action customers take on a mobile device.  With instant search, autocorrect and full language support,  improving search and the quality of results can have a significant impact on revenues.  With Algolia implemented as part of JadoPado’s mobile site, the company saw strong results with visits from search increasing from 4.3% to 15% over the same time period and session exits decreasing by 16.57%. A big change. And search increased engagement on all levels:

• Mobile sessions with search jumped by 233.92%
• Total unique mobile searches jumped 268.37%
• Average search depth on mobile devices jumped by 41.05%.

Images courtesy of JadoPado. Learn more on their website.