Case Study: Teachers Pay Teachers achieves a 2% conversion lift and more relevant, scalable search with Algolia

Teachers Pay Teachers building a rich and flexible search platform to scale a growing marketplace

Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is the world’s largest marketplace for teacher-created instructional materials, hosting over 5 million resources and more than 7 million users, with about 50% of visitors using on-site search. Faced with sophisticated users submitting very specific queries against a huge catalog, and with their previous Sphinx setup proving unreliable during peak periods, TpT needed a scalable, high-performance search solution with robust facets and relevance control.

TpT chose Algolia’s Search-as-a-Service for its scalability, low maintenance and customization, implementing granular relevance tweaks and a complex ranking strategy in about four months to power marketplace search, reviews, and seller stores. The change delivered measurable results — a 2% lift in conversion, higher click-through rates, faster search-to-checkout (more users finding what they need within five minutes or five queries), better seller visibility, and freed engineering teams to focus on product improvements rather than search infrastructure.

Teachers Pay Teachers

Harlan Harris

Data Science team Manager and Search Scientist