Constructor Connect

Table of Contents [expand]

Provisioning the Add-on
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog / Indexing
Constructor Dashboard
Available Connectors
Developer Guides
Mobile Integration Overview
Removing the Add-on
Support

Last updated March 04, 2026

This add-on is operated by Constructor

Constructor Connect seamlessly integrates your storefront with Constructor.

Constructor powers product discovery for leading retailers through AI-driven search, browse, recommendations, and personalization. By understanding each shopper’s intent in real time, Constructor helps brands deliver more relevant experiences that increase conversion, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Constructor offers a comprehensive, multi-step integration approach designed for rapid deployment, covering everything from initial account setup and data model mapping to final launch. This process is supported by various integrations, including client libraries and simplified integration approaches, to quickly deploy AI-driven capabilities like search, browse, and recommendations across your platform.

You can access Constructor via its API, its client libraries for NodeJS, Python, Java, .NET, and mobile SDKs for Android and iOS.

Provisioning the Add-on

Installing the add-on is the required first step to connect your Heroku application to the Constructor ecosystem. This action establishes the necessary connection and prepares your environment to begin the integration of Constructor’s AI-powered product discovery services.

By provisioning the add-on, all relevant modules are already configured automatically - including the Salesforce Cartridge, which is ready to install and use at that time.

Attach Constructor Connect to a Heroku application via the CLI:

$ heroku addons:create constructor-connect
Creating constructor-connect on example-app... free
Your add-on has been provisioned successfully

Reference the Constructor Connect Elements Page for a list of available plans and regions.

After installing Constructor Connect, the application is fully configured to integrate with the add-on.

Environment / Config Variables

You don’t need to set any necessary variables during the provisioning phase. Keep in mind, you must provide index keys and authentication credentials to connectors such as the Salesforce Cartridge, but that step comes after the provisioning is done.

Available Plans

Constructor offers flexible plans that adapt to each customer’s needs. Each plan is generated dynamically based on the selected modules — such as Search, Browse, Autocomplete, Recommendations, and more — ensuring pricing aligns with the specific product discovery capabilities in use. This modular approach provides full transparency and scalability as your business grows and your product discovery strategy evolves. See available plans on the Constructor Connect Elements Page.

Core Capabilities

Search

Constructor’s AI-powered search is designed to maximize conversion and customer satisfaction by returning relevant and “attractive” results. It utilizes:

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for deep query understanding, including spell correction and synonyms
Two-stage ranking system that factors in real-time personalization and user behavior to prioritize products most likely to be purchased

Browse

Constructor Browse is a suite of tools that creates a rich product discovery experience by complementing search and recommendations. It ranks products in categories and on landing pages using Constructor’s AI and clickstream data to sequence items that are most attractive and likely to be converted into a purchase, constantly feeding user behavior back into the algorithms.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete, also known as autosuggest, helps shoppers navigate their journey by providing helpful, real-time suggestions directly in the search bar. These suggestions include popular search terms, top-selling products, trending categories, and corrected misspellings. All results are optimized using AI to recognize shopper intent, rapidly return results, and drive revenue.

Recommendations

Constructor’s recommendation service delivers highly personalized and conversion-optimized product recommendations in various contexts across your site. It leverages a rich graph of user behavior, such as search, browse, purchase history. Its collaborative filtering ensures that suggestions are customized to each individual, even for new products, leading to a cohesive and integrated discovery experience.

Product Catalog / Indexing

The Product Catalog is fundamental as it combines your product feed, including items, variations, and groups, with user behavioral data to power all AI algorithms. Integration is supported via platform connectors, full or partial feeds (JSON, CSV) via HTTP/FTPS, or direct REST API calls for item-by-item updates, providing flexibility for how often your catalog is updated.

Constructor Dashboard

The Constructor Dashboard provides a comprehensive product discovery platform where you can:

view analytics across “Search”, “Autosuggest”, “Browse”, “Recommendations”, and “Collections”
manage catalog uploads and data indexing
configure integrations and connectors for seamless data flow
monitor performance metrics to optimize your product discovery experience

Within the Workspace tab, you can access and manage all aspects of your product data, including indexes, facets, and searchable attributes. This section allows you to:

fine-tune how products are organized and displayed
define filtering and sorting behavior
control searchabilities to ensure shoppers find the most attractive results quickly and intuitively

Under the Integrations tab, you can connect your data sources and automate catalog uploads through connectors such as Salesforce, or custom APIs. These integrations ensures that product data stays synchronized across systems, enabling real-time updates, streamlined ingestion workflows, and a consistent product discovery experience across all channels.

Available Connectors

Constructor offers a rich ecosystem of platform connectors built by them and their partners to automate data integration. These connectors are responsible for fetching and transforming catalog data from other e-commerce and enterprise platforms, ensuring your product information is seamlessly synced to Constructor without requiring operation.

In terms of Salesforce integrations, Constructor provides connectors to integrate with both Site Genesis and SFRA. Note that on SFRA, there are also UI components that can help expedite your path to success.

Beacon Integration / Data Tracking

The Beacon integration involves tracking real-time user actions, such as clicks, purchases, and searches. This behavioral data fuels Constructor’s machine learning models, enabling truly personalized and continually learning product discovery.

A Constructor beacon is a snippet of JavaScript configured on your website. This beacon captures information about your users’ clickstream activity. This data is sent to Constructor servers, where it’s de-identified and then used to train Constructor’s AI models to help your users find the products and content they are looking for on your site.

Salesforce Cartridge

The Constructor Salesforce Cartridge facilitates synchronizing catalog data from your Salesforce instance (SFRA / SFCC) to Constructor.

This cartridge simplifies the connection and upload of your Salesforce product catalog to Constructor, enabling seamless integration of all product data from Salesforce into Constructor solutions. It empowers an e-commerce team in real-time by identifying optimization opportunities. Additionally, you can customize the cartridge to suit specific requirements.

Installation

To get started, you must install the Constructor Cartridge into your Salesforce Commerce Cloud instance. You can find the installation guide and source code on AppExchange.

Salesforce Jobs

To use the cartridge, go to Administration > Operations > Jobs. The cartridge exposes three main jobs:

Constructor.SyncCategories: Sends all category data to Constructor.
Constructor.SyncProducts: Sends all product data (products, variants, etc) to Constructor.
Constructor.PatchProducts: Sends partial product data to Constructor. Use it to update any fields, such as prices, inventories, and any other metadata.

You can create more jobs by customizing the cartridge as needed.

Customizing Your Catalog Data

Normally, when using the cartridge, you must customize your catalog data to some extent. You can do so by:

Adding metadata
Customizing other fields, for example the product URLs or image URLs
Indexing new data, such as blog posts or recipes

The cartridge supports a huge flexibility in customizations by creating overlays to modify portions of the source code, while still maintaining the original source code available.

The out-of-the-box installation already provides a base cartridge to add your overlays on, called link_constructor_connect_custom. You can add your customizations there.

To add any overlays, look for the file responsible for the behavior you want to change. Files are organized into minor behavior actions, such as getting a product URL, image, or description.

For instance, if you’re looking to customize how products are transformed:

getCategories.js
getImage.js
getUrl.js

For example, let’s say you want to sync the attributes price and color. Overlay one of these two files:

getMetadata.js to change product-level metadata
getMetadataForVariation.js to change variation-level metadata

Then, you can add your custom attributes:

var getAttributeValue = require('*/cartridge/scripts/helpers/products/getAttributeValue');

module.exports = function getMetadata(product) {
  return [
    {
      key: 'color',
      value: getAttributeValue(product, 'color')
    }
  ];
};

Developer Guides

Constructor’s guides provide detailed instructions, code examples, and reference material for integrating Constructor’s services into your application using various programming languages and official client libraries.

NodeJS

Leverage the official NodeJS client library to integrate and interact with the Connect API within your server-side JavaScript environment.

You can see the source code and installation instructions on GitHub.

Python

Use the Python SDK to manage data feeds, query the API, and build complex back-end integrations in your Python application.