Here at Getter, we’ve been chipping away at building a leading technology focussed business, and part of this journey is having a leading search engine for tradies, project managers and decision-makers to find materials easy.
When we kicked off our current version 1 of the Getter platform we kept it simple (something we should all live by), however this became problematic as we discovered varying inconsistencies within the industry of material procurement. With multiple names for a single product, different lengths, sizes, materials and colours, finding the right product could be very time-consuming. We went right back to the beginning and looked at how we, as your trade friends, solve these issues to make finding the right product quick, easy, and most importantly, smarter.
Some interesting product synonyms we came across:
Whirlybird/Roof Vent
Moulding/Skirting
Chinamans Hat/Cowl
Bugles/Batten Screws
Masonry Anchor/Dynabolt/Wall Anchor
GPO/Power Outlet/Powerpoint
Extension Lead/Power Cable/Power Lead
Galv/Galvanised
“Most tradies are time-poor when it comes to searching for multiple materials.”
The journey began with how our customers use our platform to find products. We assumed that most tradies were time-poor when it came to searching for multiple materials, so our main priority was to ensure popular materials were easy to find.
To kick off this assumption we held a workshop with some customers to find out how customers search to create a solution that worked for them. We asked them the following questions:
Score out of 10 How likely are you to search using the 'term' (i.e. brand) to find a product within the category (i.e. Hardware)?
Score out of 10 How likely are you to accept an alternative product within this category if the exact product I want is unavailable?
The results were interesting but not surprising.
We could identify that customers from different industries used Search in different ways, which meant our solution would need to be robust enough to handle the myriad of trade customers we had.
A little forewarning, this section is a bit techy.
Our mantra within the Getter engineering team is “write less code” which, if you’re unfamiliar with software development, has large amounts of long term benefits for our small team.
Less technical debt
Technical debt is, by nature, coding issues/oversights/bugs that need to be addressed from overcomplexity, poor planning and rushed development. Inevitably, tech debt will always be present within a codebase. By writing less code we can reduce this tech debt by working on an iterative process.
Easy to understand code
We code less to reduce complexity and hard to understand code.
Rapid development
By its very principle, writing less code takes less time. We can focus on more value-driven solutions for our customers.
Look to solve problems, not create them
We look to existing solutions and third parties to help solve our problems. By spending our time leveraging other companies' technologies, we can focus more on a customer-centric approach to software development.
To begin our search we looked at Algolia to provide our customers with a solution to our search needs.
Algolia is a leading provider of technology in Search Discover, Optimisation, Recommendations & Search AI. With their platform, we have the power to use AI to gather insights to tweak and provide a market-leading search solution for our customers.
Our product inventory includes more than 100k individual items, so to be able to categorise these products and return relevant results needs to be quick, easy and quick (yes, it’s an important one). Since the implementation of Algolia, our search results are averaging 20ms and returning the first relevant result within the top 2 items in the search result list.
We have been able to increase our search result success rate dramatically by fine-tuning with real-time insights into customer searches. With this, we’ve seen a large increase in online shopping orders through trade customers with an increase in basket sizes for traditional trade materials.
With Algolia and our new search solution, the future of search is AI-enabled and ready to take on whatever requirements we need to scale within the construction-tech industry.
We’ve been looking at how we can utilise our search capabilities to drive useful alternative products through AI recommendations and drive industry-specific materials for the user.
AI Recommendations
As our search insight grows, we can tailor recommendations based on like-for-like product metadata, for example, a product with similar size, material, category and location. Which can help drive down demand for specific materials by “spreading the demand” across similar products. Something that, without industry knowledge, most tradies won’t be exposed to.
Industry-specific results
As a logged in user of Getter, we can display products that are traditionally purchased by those in your industry, for example, a plumber will traditionally buy plumbing materials so these products will have a higher weighting for them, and over time if they deviate from these materials, our search engine will keep providing products that they have preference over - all while providing alternative like-for-like products. How good!
Our new search now makes it easier for tradies, chippies, plumbers, project managers, sparkys to find the materials they need, on-demand. So go test our Shop & Deliver search engine and see how easy it is to find what you’re looking for.