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Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 7:08 pm
by igavemybest
I don't think I have ever really complained about anything, but I have had enough. And if I am wrong, please shut me up, tell me what I am missing, where to stick it, and I will have learned my lesson. So here we go...Why cant the search pull up anything that I am looking for? On the admin side, I type in a sku, no results, I type in part of the title, no results. So I find the product on the front end, copy and paste the exact title on the backend, search....no results because there is a " in the title. So then I copy just the beginning before the quote. Finally get it. What is the issue here? Why is it so difficult to get search working?

"But you arent searching correctly", you say. Type it in quotes, or do this or do that. Give me a break. This isn't 1995, and no customer is going to "search correctly", they are going to search just like they do on any other ecommerce site that makes any money, and expect a relevant result.

On the front end, full text search enabled or not, if someone types in a sku, it should search all the sku's and part numbers and the sku's of variants to find a match. Why is it necessitated that I type it in quotes, with all the dashes and spaces exactly in the correct place? Considering that when someone first comes to an ecommerce site, they generally 80-95% of the time enter something in search. But if they cant find what they want however because the results are nothing even relative to what they search for, they leave. Imagine if you went to Amazon.com typed in the SKU of a book, without quotes (because that's how most ecommerce sites and search engines work, they are user friendly), and you got back books with those numbers in the title. It makes no sense. So, instead of leaving like most people would, you decided to search the title of the book, 'Fishing the Alaska Rivers', and got back a full page of results on fishing in Alaska, or rivers in Saudi Arabia. Well, then you are leaving the site for sure.

I don't think anyone has really taken this issue seriously, but it is the MOST serious of issues and problems with this software!! Any current bugs..are just that, bugs. This however is a much larger issue.

The average conversion rates of retail sites is barely 3% (Forrester). Yet, with effective tactics, retailers can achieve a much higher conversion rate. For instance, the top 10 visitor-to-buyer conversion rates ranged from 16% to 45% (Nielsen Online). Effective search can bridge this gap considerably: customers who use the search box on e-commerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers (MarketingSherpa).

How can AbleCommerce, or any ecommerce software for that matter, really claim to be any good at all without an effective search. It is the most basic necessity of any ecommerce site, yet it is something that seems to have little to no attention paid to it. If funds were diverted away from other features and enhancements that aren't needed, and spent instead on making a search that actually works, the core navigation feature of an ecommerce site both on the front-end and backend ...then I think you would REALLY have something, and make multiples of the cost of development back.

Just my 2 cents, take it for what it is. As a side note to this, I would like to say this is by far the best ecommerce software out there, and I do love everything about it, just this one issue has me a little bothered.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 10:19 pm
by Shopping Cart Admin
Hello,

This would take a TON of processing power to accomplish. Or a large investment in time to create a compiler/index system for AbleCommerce. There are paid search services which offer deep indexing, typo correction, etc.

We need specific suggestions on what to change, so they can be discussed as to benefit and possible server load issues. SQL search is very processor intensive.

I see large corporate websites like Adobe using google search. Amazon's certainly has spent millions and millions of dollars on this one part of their website. We need to figure out how to it well at a cost we all can afford.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 12:49 am
by igavemybest
True Mike, I do understand the monetary and server load issues. Maybe just using a paid search service is the way to go, which would let you focus only on the AC7 product and let a search provider focus on good quality results and off site processing power as it is a full time company venture to provide such features. That said however, one thing that would be nice to see that would be a very nice addition is, on the admin side,the ability to type in a sku number and have it appear, whether it is the sku of a varient or parent product. Others may not however have the same issues as me, but that is something that would greatly improve the backend.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 2:15 am
by Shopping Cart Admin
on the admin side,the ability to type in a sku number and have it appear, whether it is the sku of a varient or parent product.
More focused admin results would certainly be of benefit, without as much consideration as to load on the server.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 1:12 pm
by jmestep
It would be good if in advancedsearch.aspx at least, search paramters could be implemented like they were in the Able 5 advanced search.
Sample:
http://www.affordablewater.us/search.aspx
All of these words, any of these words, exact phrase.
We were also able to recode the simple search fairly easily if we knew customers would be searching in a particular way over all.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2010 1:09 pm
by Logan Rhodehamel
With the just released upgrade to 7.0.5, or SR2 patch for 7.0.4, the retail search with full text is vastly improved. "Fishing the Alaska Rivers" will only get you products that have all three words somewhere in them.

The admin search uses a different approach because it searches additional tables. It needs the same treatment as we have given the retail (customer) search.

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2010 7:03 pm
by mmackrell
is it safe to assume that I will be able to search by SKU using the search.aspx functionality?

Thanks,
Margie

Re: Search, admin and frontend

Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:56 am
by Falala
Very true about 3rd party search engines. There are many out there, even open source ones, that "plug" into ecommerce sties. Some require a feed. Some crawl and index your site. I agree that it would be difficult for any shopping cart to excel at both ecommerce AND the best search engine possible. We have a 3rd party search software that increased our conversion rate, and it cost next to nothing. It is extremely configurable, including setting synonyms, landing pages, partitions, reports on searched keywords, etc. The Internet Retailer Conference had about a DOZEN third party plug in search companies vying for that search box spot on peoeple's website. I LOVE able commerce, i've been using it since 1996, and use it for one of 3 websites. It is by far the best. But when i wanted a better search solution, explored other options, and am extremely happy with our plug in. That being said, the other 2 carts I use do seem to have a more intuitive search. But again, as soon as I can afford more ac carts, I am going to switch to ac.