How we increased conversion rates by building our own Search Engine
Search Microservice — An Introduction
Search is by far the most important feature of any online store. Consider this: The function of a search engine is to provide relevant results for any search term a user looks up, while ensuring that the user reaches the results page within a split second. Search engines provide an “autocomplete” function by predicting customer queries as soon as a customer clicks on the search box or makes their first keystroke. Keywords, products, and categories that provide relevant results are suggested. On average, there is a spelling error rate of 26%, and search engines ensure that these are automatically corrected and provide relevant results. Apart from improving usability and convenience for customers, this also contributes to higher online revenues.
In eCommerce, keyword searches, suggestions and discoveries help your customer discover and learn about your content faster. This, in turn, helps improve conversion rates and allows you to grow your business.
Let’s Hit Rewind
We launched dragonmart.ae an eCommerce platform in the year 2020 in the UAE and then expanded into KSA and Oman by the end of 2021, where customers can search for products, view product details and place their orders. Now comes the hard part. Recently, we had big growth plans to expand our customer base and increase conversion rates on the site. The goal was to add promotions and attract more visitors. Of course, this came at a cost. Traffic to our search site was expected to increase threefold. A new search engine was the order of the day.
For a long time, we relied on Enterprise Search Engine solution, to display our product listing pages. While this was convenient, we struggled with several issues. First, the enterprise search engine was costly. Since it was a SaaS offering, customisation was almost impossible, so we were dependent on external vendors. Latency, the time it takes to display search results, was compromised at p95 and p99 percent of response time. In addition, the technical support team was unresponsive and had a turnaround time of over 48 hours. To increase traffic by three times, our costs also increased by three times, making ROI pretty much obsolete.
Phasing Our Very Own Search Engine
After some consideration, we decided to look for other search engines, including Google Search and SearchStax, but that also proved to be an expensive proposition. Therefore, we made the bold decision to develop our own search engine by exploring SOLR (open source) and adapting it to our needs. An important aspect of SOLR is its plug-in architecture, which provides extensive capabilities and additional customisation. In addition, we can enable extensive document processing.
Our next steps were to test SOLR’s proof of concept (POC), run the current product listing pages, and decide on SOLR’s open-source search engine solution.
We developed a wrapper around SOLR and introduced dynamic clustering, faceted search, integration with databases, and NoSQL capabilities.
Moment of Truth — The Final Outcome
We implemented SOLR within a span of two months and released it for production. This gave us the confidence to enhance our business and led to the following:
1. Boosted relevance logic customisation to run business promotions.
2. Custom boosting formula to provide more relevant results.
3. Refined replication logic with a 10-minute guarantee to discover a product on the platform.
4. Reduced indexing time from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. (We are working towards reducing it further to 12 minutes).
5. Reduced turnaround time to one hour.
Our costs were reduced to one fourth, and our traffic increased by 10x!
Overall, the speed at which our customers were able to discover our content improved significantly. Conversion rates jumped, and building our own search engine was a good decision for our company. Sometimes, when there are no clear alternatives, it’s best to create one.
I hope you found this article informative. To learn more about DP World’s eCommerce platform, technology stack and more, visit our Linkedin page https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/technology-at-dp-world.
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