With the new Algolia’s Magento extension, available on Magento connect, anyone can now implement, in only a few clicks, the most seamless search experience on a Magento store. Yep: Instant-Search on a Magento store, only a few clicks away 🙂 We wanted to share with you the story behind this release and what drove us to adapt this experience for the Magento community. Happy reading!

UPDATE: For users looking for a Magento 2 extension, you can read more about our latest release.

200,000 Magento stores who share 1 goal: connect visitors with the right products, as quickly as possible.

Our commitment to our users is to allow them to offer the ultimate search experience inside their stores. In eCommerce, ultimate search is all about finding the right product in no time. Shopping online should be as seamless as think, find and buy. This natural “find-as-you-type” flow that our API allows has been quite well received by the eCommerce community since the early days of Algolia. This caught our attention at the time and so a little over a year ago we started to investigate this community.

We quickly found out that the vast majority of online stores actually use platforms such as Magento, Shopify or Prestashop. Magento was the best candidate for our research, because of the size of its community but also of the diversity and the scale of the stores.

Platforms are awesome at putting together all the basic services you need to run your store but when you start looking at specific features you always find some room for improvement. Some of these features, such as search, have a dramatic impact on the bottom line of the store, and for these, good enough can not be enough.

It happens that the Community Edition of Magento offers as default search simple SQL queries that seem to be fine at first sight but actually do not handle basic features such as partial matches, autocomplete or fuzzy search. Our initial gut feeling was that people probably weren’t happy with this.

So we went on to meet with hundreds of members of the Magento community, from owners to developers to agencies and system integrators.

What struck us is that literally all the people we talked to complained about the relevance and the speed of the default search of the Community Edition. They also wanted to have much more control over the way they could tweak the relevance of their search engine.

What drove store owners crazy is that a user who searches is 6 times more likely to buy than a visitor who simply browses and they were very much aware that this poor search capability directly impacted their bottom line.

We believe that great search should be a commodity in eCommerce, because of its impact on the bottom line. But the reality is very different for hundreds of thousands of stores. So we decided to change this!

To all of you who helped us in this journey, thank you! We hope what we put together will match your expectations!

Algolia Instant Search: an open-source extension for Magento stores that connect visitors with what they’re looking for, in a couple of keystrokes!

With the Algolia extension, your visitors can now navigate across your store and find what they’re looking for in a much more intuitive way, as they are typing their query. That means two things:

1. An Instant-search results page

For each new keystroke that the visitor types, the entire results page and filters are updated. This allows to narrow down the results extremely quickly and focus the attention of the visitors only on what matters to them. Algolia also allows to combine filtering AND text search, allowing for instance to search on products only inside a specific category.

A multi-categories auto-complete

At each keystroke, the autocomplete menu refines the products, pages, categories, brands and popular searches results. This allows an accelerated and much more targeted access to specific sections of your catalogue.

And because one size does not fit all, the extension’s dashboard gives you all the flexibility you need to tweak the search engine and make it fit perfectly with your business and your users.

All this can be integrated right now on your Magento instance, in just a few clicks. If you want to see how it works before jumping in, just watch this step-by-step tutorial video on how to install and configure the extension.

And for the developers who are still reading, don’t forget that the extension is open-source; so feel free to fork the project on GitHub!

Join the Algolia + Magento Community!

The story is just starting and we need your support to take the online shoppers experience to where it should be. What brought us here is you guys, your feedback and your insights. And that is exactly what will also bring all of us to the next frontier of the shopper experience! If you are a Magento store owner, a developer, a system integrator, or just someone interested in our Magento extension, we want to hear from you!
Ping us at magento@algolia.com to become member of the Algolia + Magento community: you will get early access to trainings, as well as newsletters focused on our latest Magento related news and updates.

And one last thing…

There are tons of great solutions on Magento connect that can help you run your store and deliver the best shopping experience to your visitors. We’ve put together a small hack to help you find your favorite Magento extensions, powered by Algolia!

For that one I‘d just say: check it out… and feel free to share it.

Enjoy!