We just launched the public beta version of Exorbyte Commerce Search and Autocomplete (if you are in the UK: http://commerce.exorbyte.co.uk). It’s a hosted SaaS monthly subscription version of our popular search products (MatchMaker and SearchNavigator) especially designed for ecommerce.
We also serve a large selection of other industries with the same core products for search within structured data. However we chose ecommerce, and we did so on purpose. There is plenty of data showing how many online stores are behind in terms of satisfying users with better search features to help them find what they want to buy. Here are some of the reasons why Exorbyte Commerce is worth many times the very short time (only minutes) setting up its free trial requires:
- More than 47% of online shop visitors don’t become buyers because of poor search or navigation features.
“According to iPerceptions’ E-commerce Industry Report Q2 2009, 38.6% of the 360,000 or so visitors to the 160 websites tracked were in the research stage of the buying process, while just 17% were at the buying stage.iPerceptions was able to establish several reasons why visitors aren’t purchasing. The main reason was that visitors weren’t able to find what they were looking for (34%), while price and navigation/usability issues tied in second place (13%) followed by shipping policies (9%).
- In his book The Humane Interface, renowned user interface guru Jef Raskin compares incremental and delimited search: “With a delimited search, the computer waits for the user to type a pattern and delimit it, after which it is the user who waits while the computer does the search. When using a delimited search the user must guess, beforehand, how much of a pattern the computer needs to distinguish the desired target from other, similar targets. With an incremental search, he can tell when he has typed enough to disambiguate the desired instance, because the target appeared on the display.”
Jef Raskin goes on to say: “In spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches on the part of both designers and users, almost all interface-building tools make it easy to implement delimited searches and difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches.”
Jef Raskin even ventured to say in a footnote that search is either “incremental or excremental”. We kind of agree with him.
While ecommerce catalogs are structured database tables, many online stores still use lame full-text search engines or slow database queries to provide catalog search results to their users. This is a real problem for the following reasons:
- Full-text search engines usually have to crawl pages to index the data, making the update mechanism of search results slow and often out-of-date (not reflecting frequent changes in inventory levels, prices, and descriptions retail database undergo daily).
- Database queries and full-text queries are simply not capable of handling advanced fuzzy search like structured data or database indexing engines can. Too slow or simply impossible to implement.
Just try to build an advanced multi-field fuzzy search facility for a database of millions of SKUs (ex: online travel store, industrial parts, online electronics store, etc.) and keep it fast (under 10ms round trip) using a database query or full text search engine! Have fun and let us know if you want tips on how to make it work with a different approach.
Something that would be much better, much simpler, much faster and much more natural. An ecommerce search system that yeilds more conversions. Simply a system that guesses what you want to find even if you don’t know what it’s called: That is what we strive for every day at Exorbyte! What do you think?
