To improve the relevance of your Search Funnel, we proudly introduce the possibility to combine results of multiple Search Algorithms. By weighing these different algorithms against each other in combination with your Merchandising Rules, you could create a best mixed results as outcome (instead of stopping once you’ve hit results on one).

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These are advanced settings

Although we love the possibilities which arises with this new setup, you should be careful when implementing. As each search algorithm by itself can be pretty complicated, combining multiple algorithms does not make things easier. Changes can have a considerable effect on the search results of your website.

Although the consequences can be quite complicated, the concept is pretty simple. In Tweakwise App > Search > Search algorithms, you configure all preferred algorithms and put them in the desired order of execution. Before we would stop the complete funnel once a product/result was hit in a certain algorithm, you can now choose to continue your search with the next algorithm according to your configured order. We repeat this until a) we hit a result and you configured to stop, or b) we reached the end of your total funnel.

After we found a bunch of products, we still have to cope with the relative weighting. For example, the product X can be found in 'Exact match', 'Word search' and 'Fuzzy search'. By weighting the algorithms against each other, we will calculate a total score for each product per algorithm, rank them and re-arrange the complete order of the combined result. With relative slicers, it is possible to give a certain algorithm a higher or lower weight.

As it can become pretty hard to understand why a certain product now is shown on a certain position related to a given search term, the exact calculated (normalized) scores for each algorithm (times the relative weighting) can be consulted in Tweakwise Demoshop (toggle the insights view). The sum of the algorithm-scores will count as the final score for that given product, resulting in a final rank.

Other improvements

• Tweakwise App | The inline implementation information in Tweakwise App > Recommendations has been removed as it is fully covered (in better shape) on our documentation website.
• Tweakwise App | The directly linked products widget in Tweakwise App > Catalog > Categories was moved to a separate tab instead of shown as a standalone container somewhere hidden outside of your viewport.
• Tweakwise App | On some of our newest modules (attributes, items) in Tweakwise App, pagination options has been provided with an input selector so you can immediately enter a certain page number. Related, the page size option for 96 records has been removed on these modules.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | The dedicated Demoshop for JS implementations could not be opened if the root category of your catalog had an ID = 0.
• Tweakwise App | We added extra validation to the feed imports, mainly determining the maximum length of characters of properties.
• Tweakwise App | Some minor bugs in relation to translations were fixed. Next to that, a problem where the new attributes module was always visible in the menu even if it was disabled occurred, something which should be fixed now.
• JS Implementation | A minor bug where tn_parameters and tn_parameters_except did not work on some occasions was fixed.

There are reasons you want to display a collection of separated, configurable products in your shop as one product, so it only pops up once on your listing pages. At Tweakwise this is named 'Grouped Products' and it finally is supported in our JavaScript implementation. Whether it is desirable to show a group of products 'as one' or show all items as individuals is totally up to you, but it will allow you for example to have the product image change according to filter actions (will be implemented later) or show tiny thumbnails as available alternatives underneath.

Grouped Products

Single Products

As the option to show products as a group on your product listing page soon will be made configurable in Tweakwise App > Plugin Studio, at the moment you can achieve this behavior via local configuration. With this option set to true a different endpoint will be used for search and navigation returning products grouped by a common group key.

The first thing we tell customers in case of non-matching results based on a search term(s), is to create synonyms for it. As this is a manual and time-consuming process and not so easy to do, a little help of AI is very welcome. With this feature we introduce the possibility of automatic synonyms generation, based on search terms that do not hit products yet. By comparing the auto generated synonyms with your product assortment, we ensure you to get relevant keywords added to your synonyms, resulting in more relevance and a higher conversion in the end.

As auto synonyms generation is part of Tweakwise Copilot, it is available for free to all customers, although the feature itself might first be enabled. Once available, in Tweakwise App > Search > Synonyms there is a big purple banner where you can start using the feature yourself by toggling it on. In the background, we will create a new task in Tweakwise App > Connectivity > Tasks, which can by then triggered manually.

The task itself is as easy as functional

1. Check in the logs if there are search terms available without any results
2. If so, fetch new synonyms via AI
3. Compare synonyms with data in your product assortment
4. In case of a match, add a synonym for your search term which previously yielded no results

Synonyms which are added to your list of synonyms via this approach, will be indicated with a Tweakwise Copilot icon so it is easy to find them back (and maybe remove them). As AI has still unpredictable behavior, we suggest to double check all of the created synonyms by hand, making sure that found terms makes sense for your shop and branche.

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Disclaimer

A first period of pilot-testing found out that the generation of synonyms served by AI, only works smoothly for instances running a Dutch assortment. We'll fix this behavior as soon as possible so all of our languages will be covered.

Other improvements

• Tweakwise App | Tweakwise App has been translated and is available in French and Spanish too.
• Tweakwise App | We renamed and repositioned some menu-items in the main navigation bar.
• Tweakwise App | At Tweakwise App > Catalog > Categories some links/buttons were added to quickly refer you to selected templates, for both filtering, merchandising as builder. An edit button pops up next to the selectboxes in case of a configured templated.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | In case you make use of our new experimental Weighted Sorting in your search funnel, we have added extra debug data in the Demoshop too. Next to your sorting dropdown, there will be an extra toggle which will change product tiles into 'score cards'. You will now see the calculated weighted score that each algorithm returns for the item. The item with the highest score will end up on top.

Nothing is more frustrating than getting a higher invoice than expected by the end of the month. By implementing a notification management system, we now aim to provide you with timely alerts when your API request usage exceeds predefined thresholds. This MVP is designed to help you proactively manage your API consumption and act upon it if necessary.

The functionality we recently developed is as simple as it is powerful. By making use of our default task-mechanism in Tweakwise App, you can setup a (daily) trigger to test your daily API usage against a manual threshold. Once you surpass the configured threshold, we will send you an email with very basic statistics. The list of respondents can be managed by yourself, so whether it is your financial department or your marketing department receiving those emails (or both), it is up to you. This feature helps you manage your API usage more effectively and avoid unexpected or additional costs due to over usage. Of course, this will not fix your 'problem' in case bot-traffic for example hits your API requests hard, but it will raise awareness with the right people.

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Please note that the settings are located on the 'Setup' tab of your task in Tweakwise App > Connectivity. Do not confuse them with the standard notification settings for task completion (success/failure) on the 'General' tab.

This feature aims to provide you with better insights into your daily API consumption and could help avoid unexpected charges. When setting up this task, we recommend scheduling it to run at 06:00-07:00 AM, as the usage statistics for the previous day will be available by this time. This ensures that notifications are accurate and reflect the full day's API usage.

As introduced earlier on, we renamed products to items and introduced a new items module. From now on this is the default 'look and feel' and there is no toggle to switch back to the old module. A fresher look at product-items was needed in order to have a dynamic list of items containing both products as non-products, like banners. This new items module will output all available items in your catalog and shows the item-type as a label.

Overall improvements

• Tweakwise App | Import feed transformations could not be stopped with the stop button, but now they can.
• Tweakwise App | As a new naming convention, all instances of the word 'property' (regarding items properties) have been changed to 'attribute', e.g. derived attribute.
• Tweakwise App | The publishing of builder items has been updated so that not only items that are connected to a category will be published, but also the ones that are just used in an active builder and like a banner, so now these are now visible in the webshop like configured. If a product doesn't have a category attached and is not used in an active builder, it is left out of the publish.

Tweakwise Demoshop

• Tweakwise Demoshop | Changed the layout of the header so that the suggestions panel lines up with the search bar. When searching, the search term now will be remembered when using the search bar again.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | Added a 'Default' option to the sorting options that represents the default state of when no sorting option is selected. It also includes a help/info text to explain what it means.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | Fixed a bug in the filters where the amount of results would still be visible even if it was disabled in the filter template.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | A slightly more visible border was added to product tiles, to make it visually more appealing and standing out.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | A minor bug was fixed where the search bar was missing for JS implementation demo instances.
• Tweakwise Demoshop | The new version of Tweakwise Demoshop has now been marked as the default version, as we do no longer forward users to the old Demoshop any longer. All functionality (and more) is covered in the newest version, which we continually improve and expand with extra's.

JS Implementations

• Tweakwise JavaScript | The twn.product.visible and twn.product.click events were added to all JavaScript packages. These events were already in place in the Search & Merchandising package and would fire when a product tile became visible on a screen (at least 50% of it) and when a link has been clicked on it. Now, these events are available in every package, i.e. Recommendations, Guided Selling and Suggestions. This allows customers to use their own logic e.g. for tracking these events.

We've introduced Personal Recommendations and several overall improvements on our Magento plugins to improve performance, usability and compliance with coding standards. If you have the Merchandising Builder feature enabled and enabled Varnish in your Magento configuration, we do serve cached versions of product tiles in Recommendations too like we already did for lister pages. This ensures that instant personal recommendations are much faster than before, and no extra requests (and flickering on page) is needed when loading the page.

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Varnish required!

• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0
• Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.0.0

This update involves a significant change as we've rewritten the recommendation views to use Varnish. This could lead to non desired behavior (in case of misconfiguration) so we kindly request to test your new versions thoroughly before hitting production!

Other improvements

• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Fixed an issue where slugs were being saved unnecessarily due to being case sensitive.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Introduced a check to prevent issues that occur when a slug (a URL-friendly version of a name) is empty.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Adjusted search banners to comply with Magento's coding standards.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Fixed an issue where attribute option labels were not displaying correctly if they contained phrases.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Corrected a bug that caused swatches (color or pattern options) to be visible incorrectly when personal merchandising was enabled.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Added functionality to automatically remove unnecessary spaces from attribute values. Causing problems with filters.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Added a new feature to distinguish between different types of suggestions, such as categories, facets, or search phrases.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Resolved an issue when searching for spaces only caused an error.
• Magento2Tweakwise v8.0.0 | Updated the system to show no products instead of all products when a product selection yields no results.
• Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.0.0 | Adjusted to meet Magento's coding standards.
• Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.0.0 | Fixed a bug that affected the search filters when they were collapsed.
• Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.0.0 | Corrected a problem where an undefined index could cause errors.

But before we can sunset the old Demoshop, there is still work to be done on its replacement. We again followed up on some missing parts in our new Demoshop, which we want to become your home of debug information functional point of truth. At the moment, you can still switch between the two Demoshop (via your avatar in Tweakwise App) as we work on finalizing the new version. Six missing features were added to this latest release.

• Demoshop | The log under a lister page did not show triggered redirects as was the case in old Demoshop - this has been now added.
• Demoshop | If a filter or facet has an 'explanation text' set up in Tweakwise App, this will now appear next to the facet name as a help tooltip. As it is supposed to be implemented on your webshop too.
• Demoshop | Viewing smart indexes next to filters/filter values is now less annoying - the whole row will trigger the tooltip with smart index information.
• Demoshop | In the array of selected filters on top of the left panel you can now see the filter name next to each value for debug purposes.
• Demoshop | A category filter of type 'Link' did not take children categories into consideration when clicking on parents, therefore not updating the list of categories to choose from - this has been now fixed.
• Demoshop | Sorting in a non-expanded facet has been also fixed. Sorting in both expanded and non-expanded state for the facet now works correctly according to how it was configured in Tweakwise App.

External Data Components

In order to influence your presence, relevancy and sorting of products in Tweakwise based on external providers, you will need External Data Components for our Merchandising Builder. This can be any available third party services like CDPs or Retail Media solutions, but also your own custom built API. While pilot-testing this feature, we updated some functionality.

• Tweakwise App | It was possible to add the searchterm used to the URL of the request, but did not provide this as a usable parameter in the POST body. It is now available and also supported out of the box by the Post Body Mapping form.

  

• Tweakwise App | If autocorrection is applied by the search funnel in, then the autocorrected searchterm will be sent with the External Data Component. This is also the searchterm used to actually search for products, so not whatever the user entered.

• Tweakwise App | The category ID sent with an External Data Component did not reflect the same identifier that might have been picked by the Category Match algorithm in the search funnel. Now we sent the same identifier picked by the Category Match algorithm because that is the category we are actually searching through.

On top of our recently introduced Plugin Studio, we have added a feature to design and customize your product tiles in Tweakwise App and we call it: Product Tile Editor. This new tool takes away the dependency of Tweakwise development capacity and enables customers to make quick (or bigger) modifications, or create complete new product tiles for our set of Tweakwise JS plugins. Search & Merchandising, Recommendations and Guided Selling are covered at the moment. All new customers implementing Tweakwise via Javascript will benefit from this Product Tile Editor, whilst others require a minor migration first (which can be requested via Tweakwise App).

The concept

Without getting too technical, the whole idea behind Tweakwise JS is to offer an easy way of integrating Tweakwise via a collection of modular and configurable plugins. Tweakwise JS offers all kinds of Tweakwise features in combination with a pre-built UI, which enables your to quickly add standardized versions of site-search, -navigation and more to your platform. Both functional behavior as looks and feel are served by Tweakwise and the only thing you have to do, is adding a single Javascript-snippet to your website. All configuration settings are done in Tweakwise App, now including the exact look and feel of your highly customized product cards. In short: high impact against low effort.

Editing Product Tiles

Although e-commerce website look very familiar in general, the information provided and looks and feel of product tiles may vary a lot. Branding has a big impact and so is the market or branch you are operating in. Second to that, product tiles are subject to change and require (minor) tweaks for several reasons, for example during Black Friday or Christmas season. As every minor change would be handled and updated by the Tweakwise development team prior to this, the Product Tile Editor gives you the power and opportunity to do updates yourself.

Once Tweakwise is implemented on your platform via Tweakwise JS (using Plugin Studio), we serve product tiles based on in App customizations. Product tiles can be applied to JS modules, like: Search & Merchandising, Recommendations and Guided Selling. In theory this could mean that you have multiple Product Tiles configured, and assigned different tiles to different modules. If no custom product tiles are created (or setup by Tweakwise), a default whitelabel tile will be served.

Every product tile except for the default one, is available for customizing within the Product Tile Editor. The editor uses the principle of drag and drop to add new elements on your tile. Every element should be connected to an attribute (feed, external or derived) and has a certain amount of settings to adjust, like: fonts, sizes, colors, borders, paddings and margins. In all customizations the editor does not provide certain settings, you can setup a css-classname and do your magic via custom css which is also available in Plugin Studio. Via the live preview button (top right) there is shown an actual representation on what the product tile will look like. Modifications are only applicable on your production website after a successful deploy of your JS settings (via Plugin Studio).

One of the ways you can integrate Tweakwise into your platform is by using Tweakwise JS: a collection of modular and configurable plugins that offer all kinds of Tweakwise features in combination with a pre-built UI. With this pre-built UI you can quickly add standardized versions of site-search, -navigation and more to your platform. The looks and feel and behavior of these plugins are available for configuration in the way you like it. In previous versions of Tweakwise JS this was very limited and needed technical know-how, today we introduce a new Plugin Studio which covers it all.

With Tweakwise Plugin Studio you don't need technical assistance anymore to do basic configurations to your Javascript, starting with advanced options for Search & Merchandising. Local configuration, when used, will have precedence over the settings you configure via Plugin Studio. Plugin Studio is available for everyone who is using Tweakwise JS, but can be activated to any if requested. Certain modules are enabled if part of contract agreements, otherwise greyed out. Changes in configuration and setup are applied (and visible in the JS version of the Demoshop) after a successful deploy, something you can trigger/start yourself.

Other improvements

Meanwhile we didn't stand still, listened to feedback and followed up on some missing parts in our new Demoshop. There is still work to be done on this before we can sunset the old Demoshop. At the moment, you can switch between the two versions by clicking on your avatar in Tweakwise App and toggling on or off the Demoshop feature.

• Tweakwise Demoshop | As was the case in the previous Demoshop, we have added the Personalization Profile Matrix if personalization is enabled and any data is available. The table has the same style as in previous version so nothing new to get used to.

  

• Tweakwise Demoshop | Our new Demoshop now supports all three locations of Searchbanners, which can be configured in Tweakwise App > Search > Banners.

• Tweakwise Demoshop | Items of the type 'Visual' now have native support in the new Demoshop. If you add an item with this type to the Merchandising Builder, it will have a different visual representation than a regular product and will be labeled as such.

• Tweakwise Demoshop | Our new Demoshop no longer represents the grid widths as setup at instance level, but we now made it available to configure this in the Demoshop itself. By clicking on the cog/gear-icon in the upper right of the Demoshop, a flyout with custom settings will appear in which you can configure your grid settings. This setting is saved as browser setting, so it will apply to the Demoshop itself regardless of what instance or customer you are looking at.

  

In you want external sources to influence your presence, relevancy and sorting of products in Tweakwise, you need our newest innovation: External Data Components. This new component for our Merchandising Builder is introduced to connect external services with Tweakwise. An external service or API can be used to change the sorting of products Tweakwise returns. This can be any available third party services like CDPs or Retail Media solutions (some webshops gain such popularity that selling positions on product lister pages to advertisers becomes viable), but also your own custom built API.

Good to note is that you can not add or inject products or items onto your listings which are not yet available or existing within your Tweakwise catalog. Catalog items always should be imported already via either a feed import or by making use of our Backend API.

Builder component

The Merchandising Builder can be used to manipulate the order of products that Tweakwise returns, on top of a set of sorting rules which can be applied as well. For example you can place a predefined 'last viewed product' or a 'product of a certain brand' component by using the Merchandising Builder. An External Data Component however should be created from within the Merchandising Builder. If the specific feature is enable for your instance, a step by step wizard will popup once you click on the 'New component' button.

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Technical Proficiency

Due to the nature of the external data component, you're going to need some technical proficiency to get it up and running. If you need assistance, please contact Customer Support or your Customer Succes Manager.