Search Onboarding
Search is composed of two parts:
- Autocomplete — suggestions while the visitor types
- Search Results — the full results page (SERP)
Both can be integrated in two ways, depending on how much of the UI you want to own.
Common steps
These steps are required for every search integration:
- Register a new account.
- Add the Data Collector to your pages. The team prepares it and sends you deployment instructions.
- Make sure products are identifiable on your pages — the IDs on the site must match the IDs in the feed.
- Import your catalogue through the Item Feed. Optionally add Category Feed, Brand Feed and Text Feed for category, brand and article results.
- Choose an integration option.
Integration options
| Frontend integration (managed) | API integration | |
|---|---|---|
| Who builds the search UI | Perselio | You |
| Who calls the search API | Perselio | Your backend or frontend |
| Effort on your side | Embed widgets, expose anchors | Build autocomplete and SERP |
| Control over UX | Configuration and CSS | Full |
| Best for | Fastest time to value | Existing search UI you want to keep |
See Frontend Integration (managed) and API Integration for the details of each.
Next steps by integration option
Frontend integration (managed)
- Optionally enable Add-to-cart support.
- Prepare Search Anchors so Perselio knows where the search box and results belong.
- Perselio provides a preview using a URL parameter, for example
webpage_url?saexp=zoe. It is visible only to visitors using that parameter — not publicly live. - Review the preview.
- Go live (done by the team).
API integration
- Decide how your backend obtains the visitor's identity — see User Identification. Do this before writing the API calls.
- Implement the Scenario Search calls for the use cases you need — autocomplete, SERP, categories, brands, articles. See Scenarios for concrete examples.
- Build and render autocomplete and the results page in your own frontend.
- Mark the rendered autocomplete and results page so they can be measured — see Marking Rendered Search Results.
- Test and go live.
The?saexp=zoepreview does not apply to API integration — it switches Perselio-rendered widgets, and in this mode there are none. Testing happens against your own staging environment.
Curation and tuning
Once search is live, results can be tuned without code changes — synonyms, promoted and buried items, redirects. See Search Curation.
Updated about 13 hours ago
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