Our Native Commerce Core™ is the reason why blanket statements like “AI is black box” don’t hold water here at Constructor. It’s also the powerhouse behind our ultra-personalized product discovery experiences and the tech to credit for Constructor’s consistent winning streak (we’ve never lost an A/B test against a competitor).
Simply put, Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™ is the gold standard for enterprise ecommerce product discovery. Find out what differentiates it from competitors, its real-life use cases, and how it powers the only solution that lets you prove its value before you purchase.
What Is the Native Commerce Core™?
Every Constructor solution is powered by our Native Commerce Core™, a proprietary search engine composed of advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms, transformers, and large language models (LLMs).
The AI interprets complex patterns in product and customer behavioral data to deliver ultra-personalized customer experiences across the entire product discovery suite in real-time. This translates to increased buyer confidence, reduced workloads for ecommerce teams, and proven ROI across ecommerce metrics.
What Differentiates the Native Commerce Core™ from Other Search Engines?
Other search engines are based on legacy, open-source keyword engines from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s like Lucene, which rely on keyword-matching algorithms to return results and determine search relevance.
These keyword-matching engines are decent, one-size-fits-all solutions for cases where smaller businesses want to solve for every use case under the sun — from blogs to error logs to support documentation — and don’t have access to clickstream.
The problem? These cores were built for textual search relevance, but not for ecommerce. What’s relevant to a search query like “foundation” (every single foundation a retailer carries) is not necessarily what each individual customer will find attractive and buy (SPF foundation available in a particular shade, for example). And in ecommerce, a “conversion” or add-to-cart is definitely not the same as purchase, yet most keyword engines not built for these use cases can’t tell the difference.
Over time, the manual workarounds and time-consuming maintenance necessary to mitigate these challenges can overburden ecommerce teams — and won’t necessarily lead to business success because they can’t happen at scale.
At Constructor, we went against the grain and built our proprietary core with one domain in mind: ecommerce. Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™ personalizes for ecommerce customers, drives ecommerce conversions, and solves ecommerce problems.
By going deep instead of broad, we’re able to more easily and effectively navigate ecommerce complexities and prioritize important KPIs, such as revenue, inventory, and conversions.
How Our Customers Use the Native Commerce Core™
The Native Commerce Core™ powers our entire holistic suite of product discovery tools and is the reason why every buyer interaction further refines and personalizes the platform. This means every search informs a browse, every quiz influences a recommendation, and so on.
As such, it’s a powerful engine for ecommerce teams looking to optimize online purchasing experiences for their buyers while reducing the workload involved with manual customizations and other technical debt.
Here are some real-life examples of how Constructor customers are leveraging the Native Commerce Core™ to their advantage:
Personalizing the search experience on an individual level
Our AI-first ecommerce solution powered by clickstream and transformers personalizes search results in real-time according to buyers’ behavior.
Reduce zero-results searches with Search, which understands intent better due to semantic analysis. Also, dynamically display search facets that are both timely and eye-catching, saying goodbye to labor-intensive manual workarounds in the process.
The best part is, there’s no need to simply trust the AI. You have full merchant controls via your user-friendly dashboard so you can automate redundant gruntwork, track AI-predicted rule performance, and catch potential revenue-leaking oversights. Constructor’s glass-box insights allow you to peek under the hood of the search algorithms (and manually adjust as necessary) so you can make better informed strategic decisions that elevate your KPIs.
This partnership between machine learning algorithms and human intervention can drive cumulative lifts over time, such as +13% in total conversions for Petco.
Optimizing the browse experience
Category pages should be just as personalized as search results.
Thanks to Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™, you can adjust your product and category pages to align with your business goals while providing the best purchasing experience for your buyers. The AI leverages first-party clickstream to prioritize attractive results higher up on browse pages during all sessions — current and future.
Need to tweak the returned product results set? Again, you’re in complete control with our AI-assisted merchant tools, which allow you to searchandize according to your strategic business needs.
These capabilities have allowed brands like Bonobos to drive 6% lift in browse conversions — not to mention the additional 9% lift in search conversions and 22% lift in recommendations average order value (AOV).
Curating more personalized product collections
Take the guesswork out of creating more personalized landing pages with Collections. Our Native Commerce Core™ ranks products on dynamic landing pages according to user behaviors, product or category attributes, and the KPI you’re trying to optimize for.
See this product out in the wild below with Rugs Direct’s Top Sellers landing page:
Data gained through each customer’s search and browse sessions contributes to more attractive results on landing pages. This is powerful for users who begin their journey on your site with the search bar and then subsequently browse other ecommerce pages over multiple sessions.
Every behavior and action taken automatically populates products according to pre-set KPIs across your ecommerce site, personalizing their experience while inching you closer to more conversions.
Powering targeted recommendation pods
AI-powered recommendations offer the right products to users at the right time, keeping ecommerce metrics like RPV, abandoned cart rates, and CLV at the forefront.
There are a variety of recommendation strategies your team can leverage to ultimately generate more revenue:
- Complementary. The Native Commerce Core™ returns products generally purchased with the product that a buyer is looking at or has in their cart. It’s a great strategy to use to drive orders and for additional product discovery.
- Bundles. Based on the primary product on the product detail page (PDP), the AI recommends products that are likely to be added to the cart as part of a bundle, or set. This strategy can increase purchases and AOV.
- Alternative. With the Alternative recommendations strategy, the AI returns similar products so buyers can narrow down their options with a more curated list.
- Filtered. The returned results are restricted by a preset parameter set by your ecommerce team. So items not only rank by product popularity (similar to Best Sellers), but also their popularity within the filter (e.g. category) and personal attractiveness to a specific user.
- Best Sellers. The search engine returns the most popular items for a specific time frame. By default, Constructor uses the last 14 days and ranks products based on a score calculated based on purchases, add-to-carts, and clicks. Both time period and ranking formula can be configured per buyer on the back-end.
- User Featured. The Native Commerce Core™ uses graphs to map and retrieve similar items that users are most likely to convert on based on their individual behaviors and affinities.
- Recently Viewed. Users see their own recently viewed products from current or past sessions. For new buyers, it backfills to best sellers by default. Once they take action on the site, the recommendations pod starts to populate.
- Abandoned in Cart. The Native Commerce Core™ recommends items that buyers left in their carts but didn’t subsequently purchase. It can be used to prompt buyers to finish their orders, or even be used in email campaigns to re-engage them.
- Query Recommendations. When users land on a zero-results page, ecommerce teams can program our search engine to return products that others engaged with after making the same query.
Backcountry used the complementary strategy to cross-sell additional products that were similar to what was in shoppers’ carts or within order forms. By marrying strong merchant team abilities with Native Commerce Core™-powered product discovery tools, they were able to secure a combined lift of +12% RPV.
Building interactive product finders
The Native Commerce Core™ can also power interactive product finders on your ecommerce site.
Constructor Quizzes allow you to capture more buyer details than you would otherwise be able to via passive data collection. (You could try to guess buyers’ preferences based on purchase history, but you likely wouldn’t be 100% accurate without them explicitly telling you.)
This information they intentionally provide can then be used in tandem with clickstream to inform your entire suite of product discovery tools — search, recommendations, landing pages, etc.
Quizzes are also powerful selling tools for sites that sell products that require buyers to have deep domain knowledge to make the best purchasing decision, like mountain bikes, electronics, or auto parts. Through answering a series of questions, buyers receive more targeted product recommendations and in turn, your brand increases customer loyalty, reduces return rate, and drives conversions.
Enriching product data
Our proprietary search engine fixes incomplete product data to make search, filtering, and product discovery less frustrating for buyers and ecommerce teams.
Powered by the Native Commerce Core™, Attribute Enrichment uses text and image data from your catalog to tag your products with new, relevant attributes and categories automatically on a daily basis. Our models also leverage behavioral data to prioritize the attributes that are most important to your buyers — even as that changes over time.
Enrichment of product data eases common pain points for business-to-business (B2B) manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, too. Problems stemming from incomplete data compound over tens of thousands of SKUs and impact internal teams, who need to accurately support customers with detailed product information and recommendations.
By automatically completing or correcting product data with attributes buyers are searching for, ecommerce teams can save hours of manual tagging work, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. And buyers enjoy smoother, quicker product discovery experiences and increased satisfaction. The end result? Driving conversions, RPV, and AOV.
Powering B2B solutions
The Native Commerce Core™ allows B2B ecommerce companies across industries and verticals to create better purchasing experiences.
Constructor ingests and processes numerical- and measurement-based product data. This allows time-strapped buyers to find the products they need quickly — and your sales teams to showcase and return the right products more efficiently.
We also partner with PIM and syndication products worldwide for full integration and attribute enrichment capabilities for catalog management. And our API-first technologies allow you to easily upload and continually sync your catalog (or catalogs) with our platform for better customer experiences in real-time.
And no more will you struggle with serving correct, customized pricing and avoiding awkward pricing inquiries. Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™ offers dynamic pricing based on factors like customer-to-customer relationship, market demand, geography, or industry so you’re staying consistent, building brand loyalty, and maximizing profits.
Take the Native Commerce Core™ for a Free Test Drive
Sales and marketing materials only mean so much in a world filled with those who overpromise and under-deliver. This is why we’ve baked a free Proof Schedule™ into our standard sales process.
The Proof Schedule™ is a free, non-invasive, fully-supported process that allows you to evaluate Constructor using your own data. This way, you can see guaranteed ROI before money ever exchanges banks.
We start by installing the Constructor beacon (two lines of code) on your site and uploading your product catalog. From there, our systems begin to collect your customers’ anonymous behavioral data for two to three weeks.
Once the data is collected, we’ll present you with a business case with the lifts you can expect to see when Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™ is live on your site. We’ll also provide your ecommerce team with specific, data-driven insights that you can use to optimize your site experience immediately.