Ecommerce ops · Production

DonorsChoose increases new teacher conversions 30% YOY with Algolia-powered unified search

The problem

DonorsChoose's teacher shopping experience required navigating more than 20 separate vendor sites of varying quality, causing only about 75% of users to complete the shopping stage while more than 90% completed every other step — a conversion gap the organization felt it lacked control to fix.

Workflow diagram · grounded in source
1
Daily vendor data aggregation
integration
“they would need to gather and store the data from all their vendors and do so daily to have up-to-date pricing and availability”
2
Teacher searches unified shop
trigger
“teachers can now use the online shop to search and find anything DonorsChoose can supply them, from a host of more than 580,000 indexed products and over one million SKUs”
3
Algolia search ranks results
ai_action
“The ability to infinitely customize things like ranking attributes has been essential, and was an important part of this for us”
4
Rules and analytics refine experience
feedback_loop
“the organization has implemented Click & Conversion Analytics, and Rules, and will soon be using Dynamic Re-Ranking and AI features”
5
Teacher submits project order
output
“a dramatic increase in teachers completing their orders”
Reported outcome

After launching Algolia-powered unified search, new teacher project completion rose from 37% to 48% in one quarter — a 30% year-over-year increase in conversions — and 9,000 new teachers were added during the back-to-school peak, with customer support tickets for the shopping experience falling as a result.

Reported metrics
new teacher conversion rate YOY30%
New teacher project completion (after)48%
New teacher project completion (before)37%
New teachers added (back-to-school peak)9,000
Show all 9 reported metrics
new teacher conversion rate YOY30%
new teacher project completion (after)48%
new teacher project completion (before)37%
new teachers added (back-to-school peak)9,000
shopping stage completion rate (old system)about 75%
step completion rate for all other steps (old system)more than 90%
customer support tickets for shopping experiencewent down
developer resource relianceless reliance on developer resources
supply vendor dependencereduced dependence on supply vendors
Reported stack
AlgoliaAlgolia InstantSearch
Source
https://www.algolia.com/customers/donorschoose
Read source ↗

Frequently asked questions

What did this team achieve with this AI workflow?

After launching Algolia-powered unified search, new teacher project completion rose from 37% to 48% in one quarter — a 30% year-over-year increase in conversions — and 9,000 new teachers were added during the back-to-…

What tools did this team use?

Algolia, Algolia InstantSearch.

What results were reported?

new teacher conversion rate YOY: 30%; New teacher project completion (after): 48%; New teacher project completion (before): 37%; New teachers added (back-to-school peak): 9,000 (source-reported, not independently verified).

How is this ecommerce ops AI workflow structured?

Daily vendor data aggregation → Teacher searches unified shop → Algolia search ranks results → Rules and analytics refine experience → Teacher submits project order.

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