ElasticSearch and Kooomo integration: Optimise your eCommerce User Experience

ElasticSearch is a key eCommerce feature that you need to implement for your business. More than 4.5 billion global internet users search for products and services online, with 87% of shoppers starting their customer journey online. As announced in one of our previous blogs, ElasticSearch is now available on the Kooomo platform. In today's blog, we will evaluate, in detail, the advantages of having this feature on your website. 

First, let's summarise what ElasticSearch is:

First of all, ElasticSearch is a shared, horizontally scalable, open-source analytics search engine. It is built on Apache Lucene and uses a set of open-source tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis and visualisation. 

Secondly, ElasticSearch is a mix of indexing, search and analysis, providing you with a powerful real-time search and analytics system for all types of data such as text documents, products and images.

Now, let's see why it's beneficial for your online business:

1. Gives easy access to your customers to data

Thanks to ElasticSearch, users now have access to a streamlined and easy-to-access catalogue, where they find what they are looking for easier. Long story short, ElasticSearch aids the simplification of your customer's journey experience by filtering what customers can see based on their search history.

2. Provides a fast search response time

Being built to simplify the search process and deal with products that have many features (including add-ons), ElasticSearch provides search results quickly. Therefore, with just one click, customers can find details and features, and refine what they are searching for.

3.  Gives real-time updates

 ElasticSearch works in real-time. Therefore, if you do a change in-stock inventory, for example, this will be automatically updated on your commerce builder website and will be displayed through the search results. This will affect your live Sage ERP stock inventory to ensure that your customers have the most accurate information on the products available to them.

4. Always provide search results to your customers

 ElasticSearch allows your customers to find what they are looking for. Even if they misspell the keyword they are searching for or enter an incomplete search term, the smart technology will deliver results. In this way, the functionality ensures that whenever your customers search for a product, they always have access to results and have more options to choose from.

5. Increases your conversion rate

Thanks to ElasticSearch, your customers do not need to click and scroll through a variety of products or scan lengthy product catalogues. On the contrary, they now can search for the product that they wish to buy and find it with just one click. For many online shops, this feature has driven a rise in conversion rates and revenue.

6. Offers a document-oriented database

ElasticSearch deploys JSON, the abbreviation for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a serialisation format used for files that can store complex entities, which indexes all records by themselves.

It turns out that JSON has gained popularity and was mostly used as a format for NoSQL databases and it's now compatible with many programming languages. It’s a concise, easy and simple to read serialisation format that results in faster performance.

7.  Provides a schema-free

Moreover, ElasticSearch doesn’t need any data definition and it usually deploys defaults to index the date, unless it is identified with a certain data type. If an object with a new property is indexed later, it is usually added to the mapping definitions. To be more specific, ElasticSearch approves JSON files, detects their data type, indexes records and makes them searchable. If an object that has a new property is indexed later, it can automatically be added to the mapping definitions.

8.  Displays amazing features, such as:

​​ElasticSearch Index

This feature allows your eCommerce website to search request performance. It diminishes the necessary time to check information when a user searches for a specific word in the search query. The search index is a database that stores all the information, together with every search query. Index data is split into more indices, which in turn, contains more documents.  With every ElasticSearch query, you have access to multiple indices at the same time.

Clusters and Nodes

The main characteristic of Cluster and Nodes is that they can simplify replication, an important feature for scalability.  A cluster is based on a multitude of nodes that are running instances of ElasticSearch.Displaying multiple nodes in a cluster guarantees the replication of shards, therefore replicating redundancy, which improves performance and the search results retrieval speed.

Aggregations

Do you want to know which products from your eCommerce store are in the highest demand? Now, you can have access to this data, as the aggregations from ElasticSearch are data units that display analytical information through a collection of files. Aggregations ease the calculation and provide statistical information on data. In this way, the data is stored in a search query and classified that allows the display of quicker results on search requests.

Index Shards

Shards are an assembly of data that is distributed through more nodes. They are important because they can be duplicated to the point of redundancy, allowing horizontal scalability.