Understanding Luigi's Box Product Listing: Features and integration paths

Introduction

This guide provides a high-level overview of the Luigi's Box Product Listing (PLP) feature. A Luigi's Box Product listing page is more than just a list of products on a category page; it's a dynamic, AI-powered system designed to present the most relevant products to each user, complete with powerful merchandising tools and advanced filtering.

Before diving into a technical implementation, it's important to understand the core features of the Product listing system and the different integration paths available to you.

Core features

Luigi's Box Product Listing is designed to give you both automated, AI-driven relevance and precise manual control over your category and brand pages.

  • Merchandising suite: You have full control over the products displayed on any listing page. From the Luigi's Box application, you can pin specific items to the top, boost products to improve their ranking, or hide them from the listing entirely, all without any code changes.
  • Faceted search: You can automatically generate advanced filtering menus (facets) from your product data. This allows users to drill down into listings by specifying criteria like category, brand, color, or price range.
  • Dynamic facets: For stores with a wide variety of products, you can let the Luigi's Box system automatically select and display the most relevant facets for any given category, adapting the UI to the user's needs in real-time.
  • Customizable ranking: Results are ranked using a multitude of signals, including text relevance, product availability, and data from the analytics feedback loop (e.g., product popularity). You can further influence this ranking by providing data like margin or introduced_at (for new products), or by using manual boosts in the Luigi's Box application.
  • Banner campaigns: You can easily run banner campaigns that are automatically displayed on specific category or brand pages, without any extra development work required.

Integration paths

There are two primary ways to integrate Luigi's Box Product Listing into your website or application. Your choice will depend on your development resources and the level of control you need over the user interface.

API Integration (recommended for custom storefronts)

This approach involves making direct GET requests to the Luigi's Box Search API endpoint (https://live.luigisbox.com/search) and using the JSON response to build your own user interface from scratch.

  • Best for:
    • Developers who need absolute, pixel-perfect control over the UI.
    • Mobile applications (iOS, Android).
    • Any non-web environment where a JavaScript library cannot be used.
  • Pros:
    • Maximum flexibility: You have complete control over how the results and filters are rendered.
  • Cons / developer responsibility:
    • Manual implementation: You are responsible for building the entire UI, including facets, sorting controls, and pagination logic.
    • Manual analytics: You must manually implement the analytics tracking for list views, clicks, and facet interactions. Without this, the system cannot learn or improve.

Search.js library (recommended for rapid web developmen)

This is a powerful, self-hosted JavaScript library that can rapidly build an entire interactive, single-page-application style listing interface for you.

  • Best for: Developers looking for a fast, out-of-the-box solution to create a modern product listing page on their website.
  • Pros:
    • Full-featured: Includes support for facets, sorting, pagination, and banner campaigns automatically.
    • Automatic analytics: search.js handles all the necessary analytics tracking for you, which is a major advantage.
    • Customizable: You can provide your own HTML templates to control the look and feel while the library handles the logic.

Next steps

Now that you understand the features and integration paths, you can proceed to the guide that best fits your needs: