Intelligent product search guides customers through the jungle of offers

On the one hand, customers want an extensive and inspiring range in the online shop, on the other hand, they want to find exactly what they are looking for quickly. Too large a selection can unsettle you and prevent you from making a purchase decision. One solution to the dilemma for shop managers is the integration of an intelligent product search. It lets customers find what they are looking for just as quickly and also suggests alternatives and additions to the term they are looking for.

The search solution “Intershop Advanced Search Engine” for the Enfinity Suite is based on fact finder technology and suggests search terms to customers as they enter them. In doing so, she recognizes synonyms and is fault-tolerant. This new Advanced Search from technology partner Omikron Data Quality has been available to Intershop customers since May 2011. It has been supplemented with sales-promoting features, including the recommendation engine, with which suitable products for cross-selling and upselling can be flexibly integrated on the product detail page or in other places.

Users can filter the products they find in the online shop, for example, by categories such as price, brand, size and color. The management backend helps the retailer to create promotions, banners and landing pages. Because the search queries are logged with the help of the tool and thus provide a basis for online shop operators to recognize trends and fashions, to close any gaps in the range or to optimize the website for frequently used search terms. For the web shop customers, the navigation through the offer can be adapted according to the search. In addition, the algorithm is self-learning and permanently improves the results by including user behavior in the ranking of the products. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) model enables the shop operator to only pay for the services that he actually uses, with low acquisition and operating costs.

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