Palmer Johnson Power Systems

Multisite Search with Craft and Algolia

Challenge

With a large marketing website on Craft CMS and an even larger one on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Palmer Johnson Power Systems was wrestling with how to deliver a seamless experience to customers searching for parts.

Solution

Using a CSV import of parts from the commerce site, we ran two searches in parallel. The first returned Craft CMS content via Algolia, while the second scanned the parts index for a match – offering a link to the commerce site if found.

  • Craft CMS
  • Plugins
  • E-Commerce
Pjpower product search 2x

Two Different Platforms. One Integrated Experience.

With two large websites – one optimized for marketing, the other for inventory and commerce – Palmer Johnson wanted to craft an integrated search experience. Too many product number keyword searches were coming up empty.

Our improved search feature included:

  • A custom Craft plugin to import a CSV list of more than 500,000 parts in inventory
  • A custom elements table to store the imported product records 
  • Running both searches in parallel, with conditional CTAs
  • Nudging users to enter complete part numbers when applicable, and visit the e-commerce site if found

Over the two-year span prior to the relaunch, users searched for 9,400 different keywords – 82% of which were specific part numbers. Many had results, but none were directly purchasable. With the new search feature, one in four part searches drives customers to a purchasable e-commerce product.