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Writer's pictureKashif Hasan

Case study: AI driven site search for Eason, an iconic Irish retailer



At a glance… 

Intuitive, easy to use site search makes all the difference for customers.

 

Easy to find means more likely to buy. That’s why for retailers site search has become a commercial priority.

 

Easons.com is built with Optimizely CMS and Commerce on top of Microsoft Dynamics. It handles hundreds of thousands of products, each with complex data attributes.

 

Eason chose Algolia AI Search (the market leader in site search) and we worked closely with their teams to design the right solution and manage its effective delivery which included smoothly decommissioning the legacy search technology without disruption for customers.

 

What Eason say…

“We believe that Algolia AI Search will help our customers find what they need easier than ever on our website. This project has been one of the biggest technical changes we’ve ever made to Easons.com and FTT played a vital role in meeting an absolutely unmissable deadline.

 

We look forward to continuing to evolve the search experience for our customers, building on this strategic investment in a world-class solution.”

 

Lori Ryan, Digital Technical Manager

 

Success metrics

As you’d expect, relevance (i.e. the AI can understand what I mean and return what I want) and speed (i.e. results appear with each keystroke) were the two main goals of the project.

 

But also, user-friendliness, analytics and future-proofing were part of the brief.  

 

  • User-friendliness

    • It’s now easy for editors to operate, test, optimise and merchandise products in search results

    • No developer intervention necessary for BAU tasks


  • Analytics (customer behaviour data)

    • It’s now easy for editors to view customer search reports and track revenue generated from search


  • Future proofing

    • Eason now have scope for rich UI design enhancements as required

    • Algolia’s SaaS model provides continuous product improvements

 

About our solution

Search and product discovery are the technical foundation of easons.com. We designed our solution to be delivered in a carefully considered waterfall of stages, done so in parallel with the other ongoing maintenance tasks.  

 

This allowed Eason to iteratively test the quality of, first, the product data migration, then the customer event data, then the search engine functionality and finally the decommissioning of legacy code.

 

It also meant that system integrations and search indexing could be tested with live production data, pre-go-live, critical for business confidence.

 

In addition, search could be optimised from day one because live customer behaviour data had already been captured and injected into Algolia throughout the process.

 

Perhaps crucially, the new search interfaces could be incrementally rolled out. No big bang release. So, these complex changes felt seamless.

 

This project was done at pace, and successful, in part because we used Algolia's search interface library (InstantSearch.js) as well as our proprietary Algolia x Optimizely Commerce Connector.

 

About Eason

Eason is an iconic Irish retail business, established 1819 with turnover in excess of €220 million and 64 stores across the island of Ireland.

 

Easons.com is their primary eCommerce platform and supports a product inventory of more than half a million SKUs.

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Great to read you managed to make it happen at/with Easons!

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