This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

We’re incredibly excited to announce a bunch of things that we’ve been working on recently. This includes a full revamp to the way we handle search, a brand new mobile version and an attempt to speak Arabic.

JadoPado InstaSearch
A totally secret side project to dramatically improve how search functions at JadoPado.

We recently discovered that the team at Algolia, a new startup, have created an incredible search product specifically for e-commerce. We decided to give their product a go and were blown away by the results. It took us a couple of weeks to get everything up and running including faceting as you type as well as a bunch of indexes including one to handle search in Arabic. More about that in a bit.

Our data indicates that our conversion rate doubles if visitors use search on the site. Therefore, improving search and the quality of results can have a significant impact on revenue.

We’re extremely happy with the outcome so far and are naming the new product, JadoPado InstaSearch. It’s blindingly fast and is available on both desktop and mobile.

Here’s a demo!

JadoPado for Mobile.
We’ve redesigned and redeveloped JadoPado for Mobile from scratch.

Our previous version was starting to feel dated and we knew that a full refresh was necessary to provide a significantly better experience than what we’ve done so far.

Given that a significant segment of Internet users globally are having their first and in a lot of cases, only, internet experience from mobile, a well executed, easy to use experience is critical to ensure that you’re accessible when and where customers want.

JadoPado for Mobile is available for both tablets and smartphones.

JadoPado Learns Arabic
We’ve always wanted to execute a complete Arabic experience for JadoPado but felt that we did not have enough bandwidth internally to do so.

After much thought and experimentation with how to go about translating over 740,000 words, we ended up with a hybrid approach that prioritised what we felt was important and left other areas for future improvement.

We’ve manually translated all menus, buttons, forms, labels and content except for product content and specifications. We managed the former using the super cool localisation server Pootle and ran the latter through Google Translate. We indicate on a given product page that descriptions and specifications are machine translated so that customers are aware that anything that doesn’t look right is hopefully a machine and not us!

While it’s no where close to perfect, we’re at a place where we can start serving customers in Arabic from browsing through to checkout with a bit of customer service magic thrown in.

JadoPado in Arabic is available by using the language toggle on the main header or by heading directly to JadoPado.com in Arabic.

As always, feedback is appreciated. We’re hunkering down for what feels like a very warm summer and are kicking off a big push to bring the JadoPado Marketplace to life.