Hello Retail on Frntkey

What Hello Retail is

Hello Retail is a Danish product discovery platform for ecommerce. It combines search, category listing enhancement, product recommendations, and personalization into one service. The company is based in Copenhagen and is a common choice for Nordic mid-market retailers who need more than basic keyword search but do not want to run enterprise search infrastructure themselves.

Hello Retail's differentiator is behavior-driven personalization. Instead of showing every shopper the same category page or the same product recommendations, Hello Retail adjusts results based on the visitor's browsing pattern, previous purchases, and cohort data. For retailers with a large enough catalog that personalization actually changes what buyers see, this is a meaningful conversion lever.

Where Frntkey fits

Hello Retail is one of three search options that ship pre-wired in Frntkey. The default is Meilisearch, an open-source search engine bundled with the base product. Frntkey AI Search is available as an add-on for merchants who want in-house AI-driven results. Hello Retail is the option for merchants who want a productized personalization layer on top of search and product discovery.

On the storefront, Hello Retail replaces Meilisearch as the search backend. Product listings, category pages, search results, and recommendation blocks all draw from Hello Retail instead of the default Meilisearch index. The switch is a configuration change per project, not a code migration.

Hello Retail vs Meilisearch on Frntkey

The choice is not a value judgement about the products — it is a fit question about what the storefront actually needs.

• Meilisearch (default): Fast, self-hosted alongside the Frntkey backend. Handles keyword and typo-tolerant search well, supports faceting, and includes the standard filter/sort UX. No separate subscription. Right for merchants whose catalog is well-structured and who do not need personalization or dedicated recommendation slots.
• Hello Retail: Managed SaaS. Adds personalization, behavior-driven recommendations, merchandising rules, and category-page reordering based on visitor context. Right for merchants whose catalog is large enough that showing the same results to every shopper leaves conversion on the table.
• Frntkey AI Search (add-on): The in-house alternative if the merchant wants AI-driven results without a third-party contract. Positioned as an upsell, not the default.

Merchants can start on Meilisearch at launch and move to Hello Retail later if the personalization case builds. The Frntkey storefront supports either without a storefront rebuild.

What ships pre-wired

• Hello Retail search endpoint integration with the Frntkey product listing components
• Category page reordering via Hello Retail's category ranking API
• Recommendation slot rendering (product detail, cart, homepage) using Hello Retail's recommendation API
• Autocomplete and instant search using Hello Retail's search widget
• Merchandising rule support (boosts, pins, hides) through the Hello Retail admin
• Consent-aware event tracking (behavior data only collected with consent)

The merchant provides their own Hello Retail account and their catalog feed configuration. Frntkey ships the storefront hooks and the render logic; Hello Retail hosts the search index and the personalization models.

Hello Retail on Norce and Shopware

The catalog feed to Hello Retail draws from whichever backend Frntkey is running against. On Norce, the product catalog and price data feed into Hello Retail via its ingestion API. On Shopware, the same pattern applies against Shopware's product data. The Frntkey storefront reads from Hello Retail's search index rather than querying the commerce backend directly for listing and recommendation views.

Real-time updates (inventory, price changes) are handled via Hello Retail's incremental sync. The catalog refresh cadence is configurable per merchant based on how fresh product data needs to be on the storefront.

Setup timeline

Hello Retail activation on Frntkey is a configuration exercise. The merchant provides Hello Retail account credentials, the catalog feed gets configured against the merchant's Norce or Shopware backend, and the storefront switches from Meilisearch to Hello Retail as its search source. Most Frntkey projects that include Hello Retail have it running from launch. Merchants adding Hello Retail after launch typically complete the migration in one to two weeks.

When Hello Retail is the right choice

Hello Retail earns its subscription when the catalog is large enough that personalization actually changes what shoppers see, when the merchant has enough traffic for behavior data to be statistically meaningful, and when the merchandising team has the capacity to configure rules and monitor performance. For smaller catalogs or lower-traffic storefronts, Meilisearch delivers a strong baseline without the recurring cost and without the added integration to maintain.