Introduction

This document explains how to implement Loop54. We’ve done our best to make implementation as easy as possible and we hope you like it!

Our technical documentation consists of three sections:

A step-by-step developer guide to set up a basic implementation for searching and related features. This section will guide you through setting up communication with the engine, creating requests, receiving responses and sending the correct events back to the search engine.
Connectors for simple integrations with the following programming languages: Javascript, PHP, .NET and Java
An extensive API reference allows you to customise your integration as you want

Developer Guide

The developer guide provides a technical overview of what aspects to consider when implementing the Loop54 search engine. A typical implementation will follow the steps below, follow the link under each step for more details.

This guide assumes that you are using one of our Connectors and the examples shown are demonstrated with code examples for each connector. The same functionality as demonstrated here can of course be achieved by interfacing our API directly.

Step 1

Accessing the Loop54 API

Integration and interaction with the Loop54 search engine is done via our API.

Step 2

Setting up the Product feed

Loop54 indexes all your products and makes them easy to find for searching end users. You will need to generate a feed describing all your products containing all attributes and metadata that is relevant in order to deliver relevant search results.

Step 3

Syncing the Product Catalog

When your product catalog is updated Loop54 must be notified to sync the changes.

Step 4

Implementing Search Functionality

This step gives an introduction to how to implement search functionality and you should also read steps 5, 6 & 7 about autocomplete and custom sorting and filtering.

Step 5

Implement Autocomplete

You will want to provide your users with search suggestions as they type.

Step 6

Faceting

This guide explains how to add faceting to your search results.

Step 7

Custom Sorting and Filtering

The Loop54 search engine is highly configurable and you can sort and filter results to fit your requirements.

Step 8

Sending Events

The Loop54 search engine is a learning engine that automatically improves search result relevance based on user interactions. To be able to achieve this, the implementation must send said user interactions as events to the API. A normal implementation must send Click, AddToCart and Purchase events for optimal operation.

Step9

Category Listings

In addition to search, the Loop54 engine can also provide category listings of your catalog. All the benefits of Loop54’s clever personalisation and session intent sorting can then be applied to the order of listed products.

Connectors

To simplify your integration, we have created convenience connectors that takes care of everything you normally need in a standard integration such as handling user ID cookies, forwarding client metadata, JSON serialization and HTTP plumbing.

If you are using a programming language not listed below or require a customised integration please refer to the API reference.

If you want a general overview of what a Loop54 implementation should contain, please refer to our developer guide

Select the programming language relevant to you from the list below.

API Reference

If your programming language isn’t represented in the list of Connectors you can integrate directly with our API.