Improving Search for Etsy

February 14th, 2014

Anyone familiar with Etsy knows that it is a fantastic website for finding handmade and vintage items, and a wonderful resource for gift-giving. Now, thanks to their search API and Rank Dynamics’s dynamic ranking technology, there is an improved, more conversational, way to search through the millions of items for sale on Etsy. Click over to the Rank Dynamics – Etsy Demo to try for yourself.

If you run a search for “gloves” on Etsy you’ll be presented with almost 70,000 results. There are facets on the left for drilling down, and of course users have the option of reformulating their queries to something more precise, but Rank Dynamics has always been about alleviating the cognitive load by automatically and immediately assisting users with finding what they need.

As such, a query for “gloves” on the Rank Dynamics – Etsy Demo will produce a page that looks like this:

Etsy search

As it so happens, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so perhaps the very first result fancies you, and so you select it. If your shopping is done, congratulations. It’s very rare indeed to find something to purchases with only a single click! More likely, however, you’ll return to the search page to check out more, which is when you’ll helpfully be provided with real-time recommendations from Rank Dynamics’s dynamic ranking engine:

Etsy search with recommendations

As you can see, these Valentine’s Day glove results are coming from pages 35, 37 and 41. It is hard to believe that anyone would ever dig that deep for a search result, but here they are helpful and automatically brought to page 1.

Every selection you make and every result you skip gives Rank Dynamics’s dynamic search engine more information about your information need, enabling a superior ranking every step of the way. Clicking “More Results” on page 1 will produce more re-ranked results on page 1. Moving over to page 2 will the produce a second page of results tailored in real time to your needs.

In this particular example, you get more of what you want – gloves for Valentine’s Day:

Etsy search page 2

The results are coming from pages 29, 23 and, somewhat amazingly, 88. Clicking a result on page 2 produces yet more re-ranked results, presented as “recommendations,” and the process continues.

Rank Dynamics’s technology has been proven to deliver dramatic improvement in relevance, so give it a try!

Tags: Demonstration Personalization Recommendations