HitPay is a one-stop payment fintech platform from Southeast Asia on a mission to enable small and medium businesses to accept payments easily.
HitPay chose Meilisearch Cloud to power its customers' search securely and reliably, all while maintaining a lean engineering team and staying focused on its core offering.
Challenge
As an small and medium business-focused company, HitPay strives to simplify the learning curve for small business owners who lack time to learn and adapt complex payment tools.
Merchants utilizing HitPay often have sizable catalogs and a broad customer base, requiring efficient search functionality for e-commerce and in-store purchases. With search functionality not being within HitPay's core suite of solutions, it was decided to integrate a third-party tool. While searching for a suitable solution, the HitPay team came across Meilisearch.
Why Hit Pay chose Meilisearch
1. Easy to integrate
Historically, HitPay has been able to maintain a lean engineering team by actively seeking out nimble and adaptive tools to streamline its developers' work. When searching for a search solution to integrate into their existing back-end system built on PHP with the Laravel framework, HitPay prioritized simplicity and compatibility. They discovered that Meilisearch offered a driver for Laravel Scout that perfectly matched their requirements. Additionally, HitPay’s team was well-acquainted with the open-source space, and adopting an open-source search solution seemed like a logical initial step.
Nitin Muthyala, Co-Founder and CTO of HitPay, emphasized: 'We always begin with the open-source version of a solution, which has proven successful for us thus far. After testing Meilisearch's open-source solution on the internal use case, we realized how powerful it is.”
2. Developer experience
During the initial evaluation, Meilisearch was integrated into HitPay's internal dashboard, which contains a database of all its customers. The dashboard serves HitPay’s own account managers who need to search through their accounts by business owner names, business names, and affiliated emails. This presented challenges with long and repetitive names that included variations in spelling. With the efforts of a single developer, supported by helpful documentation and Meilisearch’s out-of-the-box relevancy, the pilot project didn’t require many tweaks and was successfully completed within a couple of days.
Implementation
After successfully testing the open-source version of Meilisearch, HitPay made the decision to switch to the Meilisearch Cloud. A highly relevant and reliable search solution was crucial for HitPay's customers as it directly impacted their sales. To avoid the additional burden of constantly monitoring the production environment, HitPay transitioned to the Cloud version. This decision provided peace of mind, knowing that the business-critical search activity would be in safe hands at all times.
Nitin Muthyala, Co-Founder and CTO of HitPay, explained: "Search is a fundamental piece in our production process, and HitPay couldn't afford for it to ever go down. So we opted for Meilisearch Cloud."
During the transition, other competitors were briefly considered but eliminated early on. Meilisearch Cloud stood out as the ideal choice due to its ease of integration and the ability to check all the boxes right from the start.
Since the implementation of Meilisearch, HitPay's customers have especially appreciated the ability to search for amounts within an order, typo recognition, and the increase in search API response speed by at least 50% for free-text searches.
Results
Today, Meilisearch is a valuable asset for HitPay’s customers and is integrated into two of HitPay's commerce products. The first is an online eCommerce shop, where businesses can create their own storefronts. The second is HitPay's POS (point of sale), the product that allows businesses to search, catalog and sync products across online and offline sales channels, and manage unlimited locations for brick-and-mortar stores, where sales assistants need to locate specific products quickly to ensure the overall customer experience.
To always keep the search relevant, HitPay offers a feature where merchants can pin or favorite specific products, which are then prioritized in search results. For customers who opt-in, HitPay sets up a workflow to automatically update the index with the most recent SKUs (Stock-keeping units) or favorited products, ensuring highly relevant search results that are always up-to-date.
Vision
In the future, HitPay aims to provide customizable user-facing analytics that caters to their customer's specific needs. This is particularly important for small and medium businesses, whose analytics requirements vary due to seasonal business patterns. HitPay envisions offering customization options for running analytics on any software, allowing customers to identify their most sought-after products and analyze unsuccessful searches. This aligns with Meilisearch’s product vision and HitPay's mission of powering product search for online shops and simplifying catalog searches for sales assistants in physical stores.