At Empathy, we want to make your life easy, bringing you joy during the journey you're about to start with Empathy Platform. Understanding the very first steps you follow once you decide to leverage the Empathy search and discovery experience is a priority for us. So choose the implementation path you want to follow between Empathy Platform as a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model or as a Self-managed Components (SmC) model.
Let's work together to build an AI search experience you and your shoppers can trust.
Choose your path
Understand Empathy Platform
Understand
Prepare your ecosystem
Ecosystem
Communicate your needs
Requirements
Index your product catalog
Index
Enable your search experience
Search
Implement the Playboard
Playboard
Deploy your UI experience
UI experience
Extend your experience
Extensibility
0 - Prep
Understand Empathy Platform
Welcome to Empathy Platform! You’re about to start shaping a new or improved search and discovery experience your shoppers will love.
But first, dive into the basic concepts you need to handle to take control of your commerce store strategies.
Here and throughout the following steps, you’re provided with several links to the main documentation pages you need to check to understand what Empathy Platform is and how your search and discovery experience is enhanced.
Whether you choose to integrate Empathy Platform as a Saas service or you opt for a SmC solution, now it’s time to communicate your specific needs and requirements to Empathy’s Software Engineering team.
The three main aspects for you to consider in this phase are data model definition, tagging integration, and UI experience design (if appropriate).
Do not panic! Your Empathy Business Development Representative organizes a welcome meeting to guide you through the different steps you’re following during this onboarding process.
The following step of your onboarding process consists of the feed indexing, a data intake process where your product catalog data is read and indexed. First, you provide a trial feed with all the basic fields already agreed upon and set from your side. Like this, the different feeds you are to use in your instances will be indexed smoothly.
Depending on your feed data, you can use a feed template to index your product catalog feed. This feed template is a prefixed schema that indicates how a feed should be in terms of structure and basic data types.
Thanks to the Index API, your feeds are received by the Index microservice so the what and how they are processed can be analyzed.
Your instance, which is a representation of each of your product catalogs, starts to be built with a basic search engine and the minimum requirements for it to work. Your feed is tested with Empathy Platform’s Feed Validator tool that assures no mistakes are to be found when your instance implementation is complete.
At this point, depending on your business strategies and the search and discovery experience you want to offer your shoppers, some basic search features are added, such as partial match, spell check, pagination, etc. Next, advanced search features are added to your instance, like Empathize, Top Products Recommendations, or Next Queries. To check that the search and index services work properly, a test with real queries is executed.
Do you want to improve your Navigation experience as well? Then, this is the moment to add navigation options to your instance!
Before starting with the Empathy Platform Playboard, your Empathy project manager will arrange a training session to demo how to work with the Playboard effectively. You’ll get deep knowledge on concepts like “relevancy algorithm” or “product scoring” for Explain, which are key to getting the most of your analytic data when using the Playboard.
Now it’s the perfect time to ask any questions or clarify any details you may need before your new journey with Empathy Platform starts. Keep in mind that you have access to a 24/7 first-line support service(opens new window) to assist you with anything you may need from now on.
Are you integrating the Empathy Platform UI experience? If not, just jump directly to the last paragraph.
Once everything is ready in the background, let’s focus on the search UI experience. If you’re not using your own UI, you can use the Interface X Archetype to quickly revamp your search and discovery UI experience.
The Interface X Archetype is a pre-defined UI search layer to build your new search and discovery experience on top of it. You use the X Archetype to easily personalize and adapt the search UI experience to your preferences and seamlessly connect to the Empathy Platform’s inner microservices.
After being validated throughout the different environments (test, staging, etc.) and having received your approval, your new search engine is deployed in production and finally live, together with your own experience or the Empathy Platform UI experience implemented. Now, your new search and discovery experience is ready to shine!
