From a more technical perspective of our product, some of our JavaScript plugins were extended with event hooks you can use in order to smoothen your integration with Tweakwise. The Suggestions JS now supports the twn.add-to-cart and twn.add-to-favorites event hooks. These events allow customers to make use of add-to-cart and add-to-favorites buttons in the product suggestions.
The Guided Selling JS now supports the following event hooks: twn.request.started, twn.request.success, twn.request.failed, twn.request.completed and twn.results.open. When using the product tile editor in Tweakwise App > Plugin Studio, all elements now have a new data-attribute containing the shown value
The concept of showing other items than products on your builder-pages (like search results page and/or listings) now has been natively supported in our Magento plugins. In order to show inspirational content, sponsored blocks, banners or visuals on your listings, Tweakwise has introduced the possibility to import non-product items to your catalog and interact with these items as you are used to do like it being products. Our Magento plugins could still only handle product-information, but from now on we support non-product items out of the box as well.
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PHP 8.1
The minimum required PHP version is now 8.1. It used to be 8.0, but Magento doesn’t support version 8.0, so this doesn’t affect you. This is related to the following plugins:
Magento2Tweakwise v8.1.0
Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.1.0
Magento2AttributeLandingTweakwise 4.3.5
Magento2AttributeLanding 5.0.3
Other improvements
Magento2Tweakwise v8.1.0 | Native support for non product tiles was added in order to show banners or visuals between products on your search results page or listings.
Magento2Tweakwise v8.1.0 | Sorting preferences and page limits are now remembered when you use certain search settings.
Magento2Tweakwise v8.1.0 | A bug was fixed where product tiles were displaying the wrong store or language. Fixed a similar issue with recommendation tiles showing incorrect store or language.
Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.1.0 |Native support for non product tiles was added in order to show banners or visuals between products on your search results page or listings.
Magento2TweakwiseHyva v4.1.0 |A bug was fixed where product tiles were displaying the wrong store or language.
Magento2AttributeLandingTweakwise 4.3.5 | Fixed an issue where the URL of the return landing page was incorrect. Resolved a problem where changes made to attributes in the backend weren’t being saved properly.
Magento2AttributeLanding 5.0.3 | A 404 error page will now show correctly if a landing page is inactive for a specific store.
Magento2TweakwiseExport v7.1.1 | Fixed a stock issue related to grouped products, and we fixed a problem with the return type for certain values (technical fix).
Plugin Studio has been expanded so that you can design and assign product tiles for your Product Suggestions as well, as you already could do for your listings. 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. Configuration settings are done in Tweakwise App, now including the exact look and feel of product cards in suggestions. This does mean that you ideally should set-up multiple Product Tiles, and assigned them to the different JS modules.
Javascrips improvements
Search & Merchandising JS | When ui.closeSearchButton is set to 'false', the search overlay will not show the close button on a search overlay. Useful when customers have migrated to autocomplete from instant search and wish to not have the overlay closeable.
Search & Merchandising JS | Extra parameters were added as configurable options (in local configuration), which could be needed to pass on through the APIs we're using. We've added support for keyboard, pageSize, filterTemplateId and sortingTemplateId. You can use these parameters to force/override values for specific usecases.
Suggestions JS | The keyboard parameter for Search Algorithm optimization can be used here too. Also the lang parameter is now handled well.
JS Implementations | All packages now utilize the TWN-Source header in their requests to our servers, e.g. the value of this header for Search & Merchandising package is 'Tweakwise Javascript Search & Merchandising'. This is useful for categorization of customer traffic for a better overview of their API usage and this information will be present in some new reports we will introduce pretty soon. All packages can override the default value in their configuration using the sourceName key, so customer may pick their own name depending where the script is used.
Other improvements
Plugin Studio | The Search & Merchandising settings page in Plugin Studio has been extended with missing configuration options, for example for grouped products and page size.
Plugin Studio | When an instance uses the grouped product calls (Search & Merchandising) we can now access these product variants when building customers' custom product tiles. This is useful for use cases such as size or color variants, in case the instance's feed is correctly set-up with group codes. We expect to have this supported in the Product Tile Editor soon
Demoshop | The Demoshop now finally supports Bucket sliders (with or without clickpoints) next to the basic range sliders!
Demoshop | The Demoshop is now localized, meaning users can now change the language of the UI in the same way they can do it in the Tweakwise App (via your user preferences settings menu).
With every request made to the Tweakwise Frontend API, it now is possible to define a Request Source. This Request Source says something about what application is generating traffic, like your website, mobile app or Tweakwise Demoshop. By sending in this information, you'll later get the possibility to get a detailed report on API statistics by request source in Tweakwise App > Insights. For example, to get insight into what application (or ip-address) is making all those requests you’re billed for.
We've pushed a SEO improvement we tested thoroughly over the past couple of months. In our JS implementations, previously only the filter options that were shown on screen were also present in the HTML. This meant that all filter options hidden behind the 'Show more' button were not visible by for example Google when indexing the page. We changed this so that all filter options now are present in the HTML regardless of whether the 'Show more' button is activated. Recent results found out that this update could result a major impact on your SEO rankings.
This also counts for when you 'collapse' a filter. Before, when a filter was collapsed, none of the filter options were there in the HTML. Now, even if a filter is collapsed, all filter options are there in the HTML.
Other improvements
Suggestions JS | We've fixed a bug where the prices of product suggestions would not update after changing your search term.
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 | 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
Check in the logs if there are search terms available without any results
If so, fetch new synonyms via AI
Compare synonyms with data in your product assortment
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.
