In this article, I want to talk about my experience with how to make a website or online store search more responsive to business requirements and user expectations.
It’s common to give too much attention to technical issues, especially now, with the advent of machine learning/AI in this field. But more often than not, the deepest problems are on the surface and their solution is much simpler than a functional refinement.
One of the main challenges in managing e-сommerce websites is ensuring the product search feature works effectively. Imagine this: you notice an issue with how products are being found through search, and you decide to fix it by tweaking some settings. However, altering these settings could unexpectedly impact your business. When we talk about something being ‘broken’, it’s not just about error messages popping up. Rather, it could mean that customers are having a harder time finding what they want, which might lead to fewer sales over time. This is a subtle effect that can spread across your entire platform. But how do you pinpoint the exact cause of such a decline? Testing and monitoring changes in an ecommerce environment are complex because even small modifications can have wide-ranging effects on customer behavior and, consequently, sales performance.
To monitor changes, it’s essential to understand what to collect and how to extract data from the gathered information. Specifically, for e-commerce search, there are no good ready-made monitoring tools available, but there are various DIY kits that address some needs. Such tools suggest collecting and analyzing search results for reference queries and visualizing changes over time. However, this approach falls short in many respects. For instance, it only covers the most frequent queries.
When it comes to modernizing site search, there’s a big question about whether this is done from scratch or if it’s possible to use accumulated data from existing sessions. Developing from scratch is always a risk—because any assumptions you have about how users will search for content may be wrong. Therefore, regardless of how good the first version of the search turned out to be, it will need to be revised and reworked many times.
Today, I want to share the approach that I have used in several projects. I call it Search Analytics. Read More »
Introducing ‘fsdumpviewer’: The Tool for File System ‘ls-lR’ Snapshot Comparison and Synchronization
This article focuses on how SAP Commerce stores models in memory, which is a vast topic. To begin with, we will explore a relatively simple aspect, such as the unusual structure that appears in the debugger when trying to view the contents of any SAP Commerce model. We will also discuss how to access all the object properties contained within it.
Taking advantage of back-in-stock notifications, customers are informed that a product they were interested in recently has become available again. Alternatively, a customer may want to get subscribed to the product price updates and get notified when the price drops on a product.
As a result, customers are more likely to return to make a purchase. These two features are often considered as must-have for almost any marketplace solution.
Their implementation and design are also considered to be quick and easy. In fact, it is not so — there are many points for consideration easy to miss in the design phase. In this article, I focus on the potential pitfalls and best practices in implementing “Back-in-stock notifications” and “Price drop alerts”. Read More »
There are dozens, even hundreds of test automation frameworks available, and we developed our own. Why? Why? Was it worth the effort?
This article describes our needs and our solution, E2E CLI: the architecture of the API testing tool which has been used by our team for about 2 years. Back in 2020, it was developed by me from scratch over the course of a weekend — In other words, it is a very simple piece based on very simple ideas. That first version was supporting 80% of the functionality available today in the last version (and described below). We don’t add features without good reason.
We use this tool to end-to-end test all our services and integration flows. Whenever we make changes to a software system, we need to ensure that they do not break what was already working.
As the architect and lead developer, I designed and developed it from the ground up, so, of course, I am very proud of my brainchild. But the field cannot be well seen from within the field. You know, reinventing wheels is not always bad. When you build something on your own, you are in full control over what is being built, what its purpose will be, and when it is finally conceived and executed as you wish. It has been two years since I have encountered any alternative to our solution.
To reach a wider audience, I found it beneficial to share key concepts hoping to get some feedback from the community and enhance the product.
Technically, the tool has nothing to do with SAP Commerce; it’s for testing. However, our entire team, which uses this tool daily, is focused mainly on SAP Commerce development. And the tool is tailored to be used with SAP Commerce.
While the client (for whose benefit the tool is being used) has authorized me to share high-level details, I cannot disclose names or code. In spite of this, the conceptual view should be useful on its own and might become a good foundation for your own solution.
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A shopping cart is the centerpiece of almost every e-commerce website.
In fact, this component is the first thing that makes an e-commerce store different from just an online catalog. Working with issues and challenges related to the cart is something you’ll never forget.
The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, at the opening of his novel Anna Karenina, writes ‘All Happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ You know, the diversity of cart-related issues I have been observing in the SAP Commerce projects, made me think that Tolstoy meant the developers as well. The diversity of the issues and challenges in this component is so vast that every case is different. However, when it comes to building or optimizing the shopping cart processes, understanding the limitations, pitfalls, and peculiarities is a huge plus.
Let’s have a look at how a shopping cart works in SAP Commerce under the hood and how to avoid making mistakes in shopping cart customization.
Read More »It all started with the idea of making the built-in flexible search console more convenient for a developer. It is common to find ourselves forgetting the name of an attribute or its type. Imagine my surprise when I found the traces of this feature in the HAC source code. SAP left them unfinished and probably abandoned. For example, for the Impex console, suggestions are basically implemented and almost ready, but for some reason, they have not been finished and not enabled.
In this article, I’m filling this gap and document how to enable autosuggestions in the Impex console. Additionally, I introduce my custom solution for Flexible Search suggestions and autocomplete. Read More »
