The challenge

For the Search Team at ManoMano, it’s a primary goal to create a good browsing experience for everyone who depends on their site, from shoppers to manufacturers. But ManoMano’s main driver of success has also turned out to be one of their main challenges: making DIY projects accessible to people who aren’t necessarily pros when it comes to home improvement. This means it’s ManoMano’s job to help all users—buyers and sellers—align. Their goal is to help shoppers purchase the right products, even if they’re using the wrong vocabulary to find them. 

ManoMano was using Elastic Search prior to Algolia, a tool that took lot of effort to make functional. Creating basic search features was difficult to do and required expertise and resources that the ManoMano team simply didn’t have. Some basic functions, like the ability to finetune search rankings, were altogether lacking, leading to a poor user experience. In addition, the team encountered bugs while indexing products, resulting in improper indexing and even duplicate items.

The solution

To scale faster and apply changes to search more quickly, ManoMano turned to Algolia, attracted to how easy the technology made it for the search team to iterate on search and rankings, even without involving developers. For example, when ManoMano had an internal data issue that was negatively affecting the search experience, getting a fix up and running took only 50 minutes. In the past, implementing a change like this would have taken days.

ManoMano was also pleased with how simple everything was to implement, and the caliber of support they have received with Algolia. “We always get the support we need, and we appreciate that we get the answers we need quickly,” said Clement Caillol, Product Manager - ManoMano

The result

ManoMano tested Algolia as the search engine for Italy, Spain, Germany, and the UK. They had originally planned to keep the test going for a month, but after just two weeks, they had enough positive results to make a call: conversion rates had increased up to 20%!