Luigi’s Box: Effective search and product discovery in e-commerce

Advanced search personalisation, easy integration without IT expertise and a significant increase in conversions. These are the key benefits of Luigi’s Box, a tool that brings online stores more accurate search and relevant product recommendations thanks to AI-based technologies.

Who is Luigi’s Box for, what advantages does it offer over the competition and how many e-shops are already using this service? Read our interview with Gejza Nagy, CEO of Luigi’s Box.

What was behind the creation of Luigi’s Box and how long have you been on the market?

Luigi’s Box was created from our previous experience with creating websites and web applications. In 2014, we teamed up with Tomas Kramar and Michal Barla to solve a problem we saw on many e-shops – poor search quality. At the time, search was considered as a technical formality, but we realized how poor search could negatively affect customer satisfaction and sales. So we decided to create a tool that would help e-commerce managers, store owners and others quickly identify search weaknesses and fix them with simple clicks, without having to involve overburdened IT departments. We worked on Luigi’s Box alongside other projects whenever we had time.

In 2016, we received our first seed investment and officially established the company. Since then we have been growing steadily and today, after more than 8 years on the market, we are one of the top rated product search and recommendation tools in the world (as confirmed by review portals Gartner, G2 and Trustradius).

What does your service offer? How do you streamline e-commerce business?

Luigi’s Box helps e-shops achieve better online sales results through advanced search, display and product recommendation solutions. Our technology, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, dramatically improves the relevance of search results and product recommendations. At the same time, analytics and tools are available in the administration to help e-shops optimize search and product discovery. This also contributes to a better customer experience, increasing conversions and average purchase value.

What are the key features and functions of Luigi’s Box compared to competing solutions?

The main advantages of Luigi’s Box over competition solutions lie in its combination of AI technology, ease of launch and convenience of use. Our platform also stands out for its self-service integration, which requires no programming knowledge – clients can implement Luigi’s Box with a single line of javascript code, saving significant time and resources. We greatly value the feedback from our customers who often highlight our exceptional customer support, for which we are very grateful.

Our technology can work with multiple languages and is tailored to handle grammatical shapes and word meanings.

At Luigi’s Box, you focus on improving product search and recommendation on e-commerce sites. How do you specifically improve the customer experience?

Luigi’s Box improves the customer experience on online stores by providing accurate and personalised product search and recommendations, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. Our tool is designed to be suitable for e-shops of all sizes, from small to large, with flexible pricing packages. For smaller e-shops that may not have a large number of searches, the personalised product recommendation features and clear category filters are particularly valuable to improve customer navigation on the site.

For example, customers can add products to their cart directly from the whisperer – you can see this on the DrMax Showcase on the Luigi’s Box website:

Luigi’s Box helps increase customer satisfaction and sales by providing visitors with relevant results and product recommendations, simplifying the entire shopping process.

Who is your service suitable for, which e-shops are you primarily focused on?

Our service is designed for e-shops of all sizes, from smaller stores to large e-shops, allowing us to tailor our solutions to different needs and budgets.

Even smaller e-shops with fewer searches can get more order value from Luigi’s Box, especially with personalised recommendations and effective product filtering that makes it easier for customers to navigate the site.

How many e-shops and from how many countries are currently using Luigi’s Box?

In terms of the number of e-shops, Luigi’s Box is currently used by more than 3,500 e-shops from dozens of countries around the world, with the majority of our clients coming from CEE countries. The number of e-shops from Germany and the rest of Western Europe is gradually increasing.

You cooperate with a number of major e-shops. Can you share case studies of your clients where your tool has brought a significant increase in sales or improved conversions?

When Luigi’s Box search is deployed, we see improved results – search conversions, shopping cart value and transaction value all increase. For example, we published a case study with KiK, where shopping cart value increased by 55%.

We also recently published a case study with Trenyrkarna.cz, where Luigi’s Box increased search sales by 51% and completed purchases (from search) by 47%.

Among the more well-known clients we can mention that we have also published case studies with Komerční banka, LEDVANCE, Brainmarket, Zoot, Pill, Dr. Max and other well-known e-shops. You can see Luigi’s Box case studies on our website. In each of them, we describe what results Luigi’s Box delivered, whether it was Search, Whisper, Product Recommendation or Product Listing.

What is the process of integrating Luigi’s Box into the e-shop? Is the implementation time-consuming or technologically demanding? How quickly do clients see the first results?

To ensure maximum benefit, we recommend implementing Luigi’s Box on online stores with at least hundreds of products and at least 50,000 monthly page views. For medium and small e-shops, we offer an easy integration option that does not require technical expertise – customers can easily deploy the system themselves. This solution is also great for agencies that manage multiple stores at once.

Integrating Luigi’s Box is quick and easy, and you can do it without IT support. Once logged in, simply launch Luigi’s Box Analytics. After that, your product catalog will be synchronized – either through the API or by connecting your feeds to our system.

For example, we have templates for Autocomplete (Whisperer) that have been fine-tuned based on our experience and can look like a natural part of the e-shop. More demanding customers can create a whisperer completely to their liking.

Larger e-shopes can take advantage of our advanced API integration, which provides a higher level of customization to suit their specific needs.

Finally, just customize your chosen tools to your website design and you can start taking full advantage of Luigi’s Box.

How is your price list structured? Do you offer different packages or do you tailor your prices to the needs and size of the client?

As for prices, we try to tailor them to each customer. The price includes, for example, the number of visitors to the e-shop and the number of products. Depending on the size of the e-shop, we start from less than EUR 100 to thousands of euros.

We recommend using the ROI calculator on our website to help you estimate the price of Luigi’s Box for your e-shop. For an accurate quote, we recommend filling out the contact form, and we will get back to you with details.

Do you offer a free trial?

Yes, we offer a 30-day free trial for Search or Analytics for clients who choose self-service integration.

Apart from the Czech market, you are also active on other markets. What are your expansion plans and how do you adapt to the specifics/limitations of each region?

We perceive that we are a leader on the Czech and Slovak markets. This year we have made significant progress in Poland, where our customer base has already overtaken that of Slovakia. We also see a positive trend in the DACH region (note Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and in other Western European countries. Related to this is the processing of words in individual languages, i.e. that our system fully understands the meanings of words, including synonyms.

As for the differences between regions, for example in Germany young people often search in a combination of English and German. One of the steps we are taking as we expand is to build a local team – once we gain traction in a country, such as in Poland, where we now have about 15 people.

How do you see the future of e-commerce and in what direction do you plan to develop Luigi’s Box? Do you plan to add new features?

We see the future of e-commerce in increasing personalisation, automation and the use of artificial intelligence. That’s why we plan to develop Luigi’s Box further in this direction. One of the main search features we are currently introducing is the ability to influence the signal weights that determine the ranking of search results. This feature is currently available for selected clients, with whom we are testing and improving it. It will be possible to adjust the weights of different signals according to their needs and test how these changes affect the trading results.

We want to make it easier for our clients to manage their searches and recommendations, so for example we have added the ability to set exactly which products will appear in specific positions in the recommendations. This gives them more control over what products customers see.

We’ve also added analytics for Product Listing, which provides a clear view of product categories. Better product filtering improves customer experience and therefore conversions.

For clients who manage multiple e-shops, we are developing improved tools for joint configuration, allowing them to manage more easily across countries and regions. We’re also working on improving synonyms, which will increase search accuracy, and we’re preparing improvements to the whisperer to better suggest products and categories in searches.

In the near future, we will focus on even faster and more efficient integrations, including support for new e-commerce platforms and improvements to existing ones such as Shoptet, Magento, IdoSell, Shopware and Shopify. We are also preparing a self-service solution for Luigi’s Box Recommender, which is particularly suitable for smaller and medium-sized clients who will be able to manage the entire integration process themselves.

We are also investing in innovations such as semantic search and AI technology to provide our clients and their customers with an even better and more personalised online shopping experience.

Semantic search consists in the fact that we do not search for words in product descriptions, as in the case of a classic keyword search, but we use a vector model that is derived from the product range of the client. Each user query and each product in the e-shop is represented by a vector. Similar products have a similar vector. We then look for product vectors that are most similar to the user query vector. The advantage of this approach is that we can find even products that are normally very hard to find via keyword search.

What would you recommend to e-shops that are considering implementing search and recommendation tools? What should be their primary focus?

First and foremost, we recommend that e-shops that are considering implementing search and recommendation tools realize that it’s not just about buying software. Many IT departments often feel that they can develop such software in-house, but the opposite is true. Developing such a system is complex and time consuming.

We rely on a large number of in-house A/B tests, dozens of them are evaluated every month. This is often more demanding than the implementation itself. Finding out which approaches work in a given industry segment and with which settings.

Software like Luigi’s Box replaces a lot of manual work that would otherwise have to be done by a team of people. In addition, a big advantage is our customer support, which actively monitors whether everything is working properly and takes care of optimizing your results.

In the case of smaller e-shops, we provide self-service integration, which every e-shop owner should be able to handle. After deployment, they will see the results in clear analytics and can then decide if they want to continue with the paid version.

For larger e-shops or customized implementations, we start with a Proof-of-Concept phase where the implementation options are mapped and testing takes place (days to weeks). After testing, you can decide if continuing makes sense for you. In most cases, e-shops continue with the paid version, but the decision is yours.

If you want the best results (the most accurate search and product recommendations for your customers), focus on the quality of the input data in your data feed.

What is the best way to start working with Luigi’s Box? Who do I contact and what are the usual first steps when starting the service?

The best way is to contact our VP of Domestic Markets SK/CZ, Pavel Pinkas. Or you can write to us via our form and we will get back to you.