When I worked with HealthPost on their Japanese-language site, it was a truly new and educational adventure. SLI Systems’ clients have websites in numerous countries and languages, but this was my first experience integrating a site with Japanese characters in addition to an English alphabet.
HealthPost is a New Zealand-based natural health and beauty website that carries a variety of vitamins and supplements, natural beauty and personal care products. It was founded by Abel Butler when he had a hard time finding discount options for natural health products. The original English-language site was growing well, and when they found an opportunity to enter the Japanese market they took the leap. I worked with them to implement our Learning Search product, and we are exploring other products to add in the future.
While our integrations are usually pretty straightforward, mostly dealing with the technical details of the specific products we are integrating, we were faced with a different challenge – providing site search for characters in a different language. We wanted to make sure that our search results were just as relevant and complete when dealing with Japanese characters. I really wanted to make sure that our searches were providing exceptional results and that the characters were being handled appropriately. I also made some adjustments to our refinements to adjust for Japanese characters and to our popular searches page, which was pretty easy thanks to the flexibility of SLI.
It’s been fantastic to see the search on the site go live. Eco and Abel from HealthPost were very friendly and easy to work with and I’m happy that we could work to build a great site search solution for them. Knowing that our team has the expertise to work with other languages and characters means that we have the ability to be innovative and respond to new challenges in the future. It’s a great opportunity for us and a real indicator that there is huge potential for SLI Systems in the Asia market for site search.
From this implementation I learned that there are almost limitless possibilities going forward. It’s an exciting time to work at SLI, and I look forward to many more integrations with international companies!
If you would like to learn more about how we can integrate our site search into your eCommerce site, feel free to drop me an email at: Discovery@sli-systems.com.
