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To our dear customers and partners,
I’m Tony, co-founder, and CEO of Boost Commerce.
This year marks our third year on the journey to deliver robust technology solutions for your eCommerce businesses to grow at scale. This is also a very unique year, where the world is facing an unprecedented global pandemic. Despite the uncertainties we face, we need to keep our heads up and more importantly, to focus on what will happen next.
The seasonal rush is right around the corner and I wanted to take this opportunity to give you some updates on our preparation for holiday sales this year.
Boost Updates for Holiday Sales 2020
1. Tweaks to the back-end
To prepare for the largest sales of the year, we have reviewed our app inside out.
The search algorithm has been refined to provide the most accurate results yet. The search result mainly depends on the field area and the minimum percentage a search term must match, which you can control from head to toe.
Together with a separate pricing package for Shopify Plus stores, we have upgraded Premium infrastructure in addition to the General one, which provides dedicated support for eCommerce sites with a large inventory and high traffic.
Year-end holiday sales are a crucial period for all businesses, especially this year, as we’re expecting to see a significant surge in online shopping. In the BFCM period last year, API requests for filter and search hit a peak of nearly 3x the usual traffic. With careful preparation, we successfully assisted more than 5,000 Shopify stores in carrying out their biggest sales campaign of the year.
Boost witnessed a more than 300% increase in navigation and search requests in BFCM 2019.
This year, with the assumption that online holiday shopping will be dominant, Boost has doubled the number of servers in both General and Premium infrastructure. To accommodate seasonal traffic spikes, we have upgraded our app infrastructure using AWS Premium Plan to support high traffic and requests for all stores. We’re also closely monitoring our app's performance. That's why our team can come up with and put forward solutions for any issue with speed.
The Boost team is also reworking the sync system with a new approach. It’ll help to update the latest data much faster and more effectively. We expect the new sync system will improve processing time by at least 50%. As a result, our app can quickly reflect any changes in your store data, making your campaigns run smoother.
Another notable update of Boost Product Filter & Search is that we have optimized our frontend library. This improvement helps to substantially increase performance and page speed scores.
An example of a store using a clean Debut theme that we tested. You can see the increase of page speed score from 88 to 93 after upgrading to the latest Boost app.
We ran an experiment with the latest version of Boost on several popular Shopify themes, including Debut, Turbo, Warehouse, and Prestige. The result was an increase in the performance score by up to 20 points on Google PageSpeed.
It’s important to note that the page speed can be affected by many factors other than our app. However, we are and we will keep doing our best to help your site run as fast as possible.
2. Superior Support for the Sales Season
Dedicated Support Service
From November 7th to December 25th, our support team is online 24/7 to assure the stability of our app, to monitor the issues from your online businesses to ensure your urgent requests will be handled in a timely manner. Feel free to reach us at support@boostcommerce.net anytime you need help.
5-Star Support Team
Thanks to our stellar Product and Technical Support team, we can bring you 5-star support. I’m proud to say that this holiday season, Boost is backed with more talent from different time zones to handle any issue in a timely and effective manner.
With the assistance of our stellar support team, we can promise you an excellent experience when using our Boost Product Filter & Search app
3. Feature Improvements
Systemize Your Filter Trees with Various Filter Option Types
One-level filter options are not suitable for large inventory stores as it results in redundant and ineffective filter trees.
The seemingly infinity filter tree of Nike (Source: Nike)
Grab some best practices to apply to your filter trees here.
With Boost Product Filter & Search, you can create filter options with up to three levels for Collections and Tags filter options.
Gameology makes great use of the multi-level Collection filter option for the holiday sales by grouping all the offers into “Sale”. Online shoppers then can go into more details about which sales they want to have a further look at.
The 2-level Collection filter option collapsed by default gives the overall filter tree an organized look while e-shoppers can easily navigate the right product. (Source: Gameology)
You can also create range sliders for filter options that contain numbers with the custom range sliders function.
Look how Cook Woods has optimized the dimension filter options with the Custom Range Slider. If the Width, Length, and Thickness used the conventional display with a list or box, the filter trees would be too long. (Source: Cookwoods)
How it helps holiday sales
Thanks to the diversity of filter options, Boost Product Filter & Search helps online stores create a neat and clean filter tree. Not only does your eCommerce site get a plus point in terms of UI but shoppers also find it effortless to get what they want - another point for UX.
Using multi-level filter options, you can make your filter tree identical to the main site navigation, creating a smooth transition from browsing to filtering.
Filter use increases around 50% during BFCM, so having a nice and easy-to-navigate filter tree is a big bonus for your store and will lead to more sales.
Optimize Search Functionality with No search result suggestions
“Product not found” is the dead-end in the customer journey, so why don’t you prevent that hurdle right from the search box?
In the Instant search display setting, you can add search terms and products for a recommendation when no hits return.
When enabled, “No search result” suggestions give shoppers more ideas to look at instead of leaving them a complete blank.
How it helps holiday sales
“No search result” suggestions pose a timely follow-up when customers don’t get what they want. While leaving a blank space and no follow-up can push browsers away, those recommendations keep them stay for a little longer, increasing time on site and reducing bounce rate.
Besides, you as the store owner can pick what items and search terms are recommended. Hence, you can integrate the sales campaign with site search functions via promoting specific merchandise such as high-margin products, best-selling items, or new arrivals.
Other Useful Features You May Already Know About
In August, we introduced Product visibility, which allows customers to hide products with specific tags from the collection page, search page box, or Instant search widget. This feature is of great help when you want to put not-for-sales items out of search(for example, free products in a promotion campaign).
Earlier in June, Boost also released Merchandising with two sub-functions to promote products automatically.
With the Merchandising feature, you can integrate marketing campaigns to site search to achieve the business goals. For example, you can create a merchandising rule from “Date published” to feature "just-in" products on the top so it matches your ongoing promotion for new arrivals.
4. New Integration
Boost Product Filter & Search can now be accompanied with Shopify Multi-currency.
If you are using Shopify Payments and enabling multiple currencies, you can integrate it with our Price filter option without a third-party app.
Eastwood Guitars is one of our customers who use Boost Product Filter & Search with Shopify Multi-Currency feature integration (Source: Eastwood Guitars)
How it helps holiday sales
This new integration reduces a third-party multi-currency app in your eCommerce. As a result, your API requests remain lower, and your store’s response time speeds up.
Because Multi-currency is a free function of Shopify, you can save your budget for other purposes, such as running doorbusters or doing a remarketing campaign. At the same time, your customers are happier to shop in their local currency.
Seasons greetings from Boost: We are ready for the holidays
This year’s holiday sales will occur in the New Normal with many uncertainties. But I know that with careful preparation, together we can handle any situation. We are 100% ready to assist you in successfully running your biggest online sales campaigns.
As we enter the sales season and look ahead to New Year, I want you to know that we will continue to strive for your success. We will provide the best product with more practical improvements to bring your business the best value.
Finally, on behalf of the Boost team, I wish you a successful holiday sales season, and thank you for being a part of this inspiring journey.
