Goodbye 2022! What a first year for Motive.co

The end of the year is the most nostalgic time of all, it’s the perfect opportunity to reflect on everything that has happened in the last twelve months and set your expectations for the twelve months ahead.

If that’s such a remarkable time for an individual, imagine how decisive it can be for a product, as it is the result of the efforts of many, the conversations that arise and the voices of all those who use it. All those actors walk together during the year to create something beautiful, and it’s always good to stop and look back.

The e-Commerce industry has been a major player for quite some time now, and the importance of digital trust hasn’t but grown during the last years. But for Motive.co, most of all, 2022 was the year when we gave shop owners the search tool to rocket their sales, and bursted the industry as main characters in the fight for digital trust.

Starting together

At the beginning of the year, we talked about the challenge that it is to build a product from scratch, and how it cannot be conceived without the contributions of all those who make it possible. Motive Commerce Search could not be where it is right now without all those that did their bits during the process.

Having a diverse team was key to understanding what the industry expected from us before the product was out there, and our first beta testers were also great contributors to set up the expectations. From how the product was built technically to how we communicated with our clients, everything had to be perfect and convey the values of joy, understanding and trust on which we all believed in.

During this last year, our team grew significantly, and once that the product was a reality, more talent joined to share the product with the world.

Learning to walk

We started the year with just a few beta customers with whom we iterated on the first stages of product development. Now that the year comes to an end, there are some hundreds of shops enjoying our simple yet highly sophisticated search and discovery tool.

The road from just a basic product and a handful of beta customers to a bigger reach and a solid product was steady but speedy, and there were some milestones that we all hit together in this process.

First came the soft launch of our product, when the tool was mature enough to offer our first shop owners a complete search solution for e-Commerce. After this first stage, Motive’s connection to PrestaShop was bullet-proof and we were ready to make it public: Motive Commerce Search was launched!

Since the launch, we focused on welcoming these new clients the best way we could and expanding the possibilities of our product to cover all the needs that shop owners may have with regards to their search. We introduced new features to tweak your search, improved the ones that were already there and even launched the product for WooCommerce users.

Along the way, we complemented the product with useful information on how to use the product, the key benefits it may bring to your shop, videos on how to use it and even reflected on the effectiveness of Motive Commerce Search with our beloved MundoAlfombra to put numbers to reality.

Ready to fly

Motive is what it is today thanks to collaboration and understanding of what shop owners need, but the principles since it all started were clear: make e-Commerce search the equivalent of a shop assistant, helping to drive sales and doing so while respecting shoppers’ privacy. That’s been the common thread that set out foundations and is still present every day.

What shoppers interact with is the search layer of your shop, and we wanted to give them the same experience they’re used to when shopping in the e-Commerce platforms of big brands. The search had to be quick, powerful and helpful, making shoppers find what they were looking for so that successful shopping stories could happen every time.

But for shoppers to be pleased with their searching journeys, shop owners must have actionable insights and sufficient tools too. From creating synonyms for equivalent searches, to adding banners for campaigns or creating business rules to affect how items are shown to shoppers, we’ve introduced all necessary features to make search your own.

Since all those features have been released, we’ve helped shop owners navigate through the exciting times of Black Friday and the holiday season, understand how advocating for digital trust is important for their businesses, and how to use different tools to avoid the terrifying No Results page from happening to their shoppers. Motive Commerce Search has also been increasingly enabling shop owners to control how their search looks like and how product cards are shown.

All this has just been the beginning, and our goal for 2023 is to expand those capabilities and give shoppers an even better experiences, and shop owners the possibility to tweak their search even more, starting with improvements to what their product cards show in the upcoming weeks.

The best is yet to come

We rely on joyfulness and understanding, and we’ll be sure to take shop owners into account when introducing new features and polishing what we already have, as well as offering the most simple yet sophisticated search and discovery tool they can have.

Sharing the importance of digital trust, as reported by McKinsey, is one the main concerns of shoppers and shop owners alike, and it’s our backbone too. For us to enable shop owners to advocate privacy, we need to have a bigger reach on e-Commerce platforms so that everyone can spread Motive.co’s aim for digital trust, and that’s a key point we’ll be focusing on.

Next year will be an interesting one, and we hope to have you all on board for the challenges that we’ll have to face as one. 2022 has been amazing, and we cannot wait to see how incredible 2023 will also be with all of you.