eCommerce is about finding products customers want to purchase but also promoting products that a vendor ones to sell and presenting them in a sales effective manner. While good and effective search can increase the pleasure of shopping, increase trust and accelerate the sales process, slow, imprecise and clumsy search can lose customers. IB provides a number search integration and information exploration methods and features that are particularly suitable for eCommerce applications.
- Dynamic per-db search thesauri: each database (index) may contain its own synonyms and related terms and these can be used (or not) at search time.
- Fuzzy, phonetic and other term search algorithms to "work around" misspelled search terms
- Scan allows for interfaces to be developed where people browse products by names they don't yet know.
- Datatypes such as (search time) calculated numerical and monetary types allow, for example, prices to track foreign exchange markets.
- Search refinement (e.g. facets) functionality.
- Easily manageable product promotions and search time product rank boosting.
- Structured search allows for sorting and filtering by price, brand, geo-spatial location, availability and any other (defined) useful criteria.
- Pre-index item categorization allows for search result clustering (and boosting).
- Customizable and user-installable ranking, scoring and sorting methods.
- The ability to transparently integrate of other search sources such as SQL servers allows for realtime search of inventory and other volatile data features.
- Full customization to control how products are displayed in search results
- The possibility to get SQL back as a response to a query allows for realtime presentation views.
