With new eCommerce trends emerging extremely fast nowadays, it is critical for eCommerce businesses to follow the new trends to survive in today’s competitive market.
One such emerging trend is ElasticSearch. eCommerce site search, as you might already know, has now become a primary purchasing path for online shoppers.
According to a recent survey, consumers that use the search functionality in eCommerce stores are 200% more likely to make the purchase than those who don’t use the search functionality.
This data alone is enough to prove that if you don’t optimize and improve the search functionality of your eCommerce store, you’re going to lose a lot of sales because of it.
The good news is, you can easily upgrade the search functionality by incorporating ElasticSearch in your Magento eCommerce store.
What is Magento 2 ElasticSearch?
ElasticSearch is an open-source, highly-scalable, and enterprise-grade search engine that is based on Apache Lucene.
It was designed in such a way that it can easily use in distributed environments by providing scalability and flexibility.
ElasticSearch basically allows anyone to combine and perform different kinds of searches irrespective of their data types like structured, unstructured, geo, and metric.
This is extremely beneficial for both customers as well as Magento 2 store owners because ElasticSearch provides much faster and real-time relevant search results to customers, which ultimately boosts the conversion rate for eCommerce businesses.
And the best part is, you can now easily integrate ElasticSearch into your Magento 2 eCommerce store and utilize its full potential through a third-party Magento 2 ElasticSearch Extension.
Below, we’ve shared some of the best benefits of Magento 2 ElasticSearch to show why you should consider using it in your eCommerce store.
Benefits of Magento 2 ElasticSearch?
Let’s discuss some of the major benefits of incorporating ElasticSearch into Magento 2 eCommerce store.
1 - High Performance
ElasticSearch is powerful enough to be able to perform extremely fast searches through its distributed inverted indices.
In simple words, ElasticSearch is capable of catching all the search queries for the result set so that each time a search query contains a cached filter, it will direct the search for the result from the cache.
As a result, it can retrieve the searched data results in less than 10 ms, which is a lot faster than the typical SQL database which retrieves searched data in more than 10 seconds.
2 - Easily Scalable
Since ElasticSearch is based upon a distributed architecture, it can be scaled up to thousands of servers and can store thousands of gigabytes of data.
What’s more, is that it is designed in such a way that it can run smoothly on any cluster or system that contains multiple nodes.
So, when you grow from a single small cluster to a big or even a massive cluster, the scaling process only requires a little planning but is nearly automatic.
3 - Distributed Architecture
ElasticSearch, besides being a perfect internal site search engine for handling search queries, is also powerful enough to manage huge volumes of data through its distributed architecture.
In leymen’s terms, ElasticSearch’s distributed architecture basically divides the indices into the shards, and each shard is capable of generating innumerable replicas.
That means whenever new documents are being added to the database, the routing and rebalancing operations are automatically conducted.
4 - Document-Oriented Database
ElasticSearch uses JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation.
It is basically a serialization format used for documents in order to store complex entities that indexes all the records all by themselves.
In fact, JSON has become a popular and widely used format for NoSQL databases and is now compatible with lots of programming languages.
It is an extremely concise, easy, and simple to read serialization format that ultimately results in faster performance.
5 - Schema Free
ElasticSearch is also schema-free, meaning that it does not require any sort of data definition and it generally uses defaults to index the date unless it is being specified with a particular data type.
In simple words, ElasticSearch accepts JSON documents, detects their data type, indexes the records, and makes it searchable.
And when an object with a new property is indexed later, it automatically gets added to the mapping definitions.
Conclusion
Overall, the ElasticSearch is an incredible search engine for eCommerce sites with lots of modern features and business benefits.
In fact, today ElasticSearch is already being utilized by thousands of eCommerce businesses all around the world especially because of its excellent features that help to improve conversion rate for online stores.
With that being said, if you’re also looking for new ways to improve your conversion rate and grow your revenue, incorporating Magento 2 ElasticSearch Extension into your online store is an sure-fire way to achieve it.