Ecommerce marketplace Modalova doubles its revenue by improving search accuracy with Elastic

The founder of Modalova, Gabriel Kaam recognized the need for a robust search to efficiently handle the site’s vast inventory and deliver more personalized results to customers. With over 10,000 brands and two million products, Modalova needed a solution that could scale and provide the control it needed to handle traffic of 150,000 monthly visitors. Modalova also wanted to adopt a search solution that could deliver a great customer experience and offer the insights needed to grow the business.

Modalova chose Elasticsearch^® via Elastic Cloud on AWS to help the team achieve these goals. Elasticsearch’s robust search capabilities enabled them to refine their algorithms, ensuring customers receive relevant and personalized search results. Elasticsearch also provided the necessary infrastructure to refresh the database daily, ensuring accurate and up-to-date product information. Modalova’s solution uses the Elasticsearch PHP API to index its product catalog. The search application is formed of a Laravel+PostgreSQL+Elasticsearch stack that indexes the database and runs on Heroku (powered by AWS). There is JavaScript on the frontend, which is a custom vanilla implementation using the Elasticsearch REST API.

As Modalova builds off the initial success of Elastic, the brand is also looking to take advantage of more of the features Elastic offers. The team is currently testing and refining the implementation of advanced natural language processing (NLP) and vector search. The goal is to introduce a picture recognition feature, enabling users to effortlessly find products from uploaded photos and enhance the search bar with NLP, allowing users to input descriptive queries like "red dress with floral design below €100." This ongoing testing and development of NLP will further elevate the user experience and make the search process more intuitive and human-like.

Modalova also aims to fine-tune its search functionality with Elasticsearch’s search analytics capabilities later this year, prioritizing brands and products based on environmental sustainability and popularity.