3 min read

My History overview

Hmm… How did I get to that product last week?

My History lets your shoppers control their entire search history in your commerce store, so they not only access their previous search intents but also have full control over their search data.

My History

There are times when your shoppers have found a product they liked or wanted, visited the product description page, and finally closed it. One day, they may want to retrieve the same product but can’t remember how they got there or generated the search result. You may think it’s quite easy to get back to a search result using History Queries. But if the search was done many days earlier, your shoppers may have to start from square one.

My History is a dashboard that displays all the search records together with a calendar, arranging searches from the most recent for easier navigation. Shoppers can check out all the search queries they performed in your commerce store and on which day they made it.
Search records are clickable. You can click on one history query and launch a new search, retrieving the most relevant results at the moment.

You can identify My History mostly under labels such as My history, My search history, or My search. You mostly find a link or button in the Predictive layer that gives you access to My History.

note

You can use History Queries to show the shoppers' most recent searches on the fly.

Shopper’s privacy matters

Search data is saved on the browser’s local storage; it never travels outside the shopper’s device. My History allows shoppers to manage the search history in their browser storage, featuring your shoppers’ data privacy and control. Shoppers can take control of their search history data and stop saving search history at any time.

When history tracking is activated, search history is saved indefinitely on the shopper's device until history queries are deleted manually or deactivated. If deactivated, no more history records are saved on the browser’s local history, and all the previous history queries are deleted. Data is removed from the shopper’s device; it cannot be recovered, even if history queries are enabled again.

note

When a history query is deleted from My History, it's also cleared in the History Queries list and vice versa.

Personal data information

Empathy Platform does not use cookies to store data. The information stored locally does not include any personal data at all. See Interface X data privacy and browser local storage to check out the information stored on your shoppers’ devices.

Spot the difference

My History displays the whole list of history searches performed in your commerce store, i.e. all shopper’s history queries. Instead, the History Queries feature lists just the most recent history searches.

You can delete search queries one-by-one or clear them all at once from either the History Queries list or My History dashboard. But it does not prevent you from keeping saving new searches. You control your search history data only with My History, where you activate or deactivate search history tracking whenever you want.

Try My History to...

  • Refresh shoppers with previous searches and intents. Let them access the complete list of history queries.
  • Help shoppers find products they visited once but can’t find anymore.
  • Allow shoppers to manage previous searches by deleting manually irrelevant searches from their history.
  • Give shoppers total control over their search history data. Let them decide to stop saving search history or not.

The inner workings of History Queries

My History is based on the shopper's browsing history using the browser's local web data. This means that shoppers' history data is not stored in Empathy servers; data always remains in the shoppers' devices.

interact

To learn more about the information stored in the browser’s local storage, check out Interface X data privacy and browser local storage

see it in action

Do you want to see how My History works? Watch now a demo (opens new window) presented by Gerardo Vázquez, our Interface X Product Owner at Empathy.co.