E-Commerce Site Search Tools And Product Attributes: The Series (Part 3 of 3)
How To Best Obtain Product Attribute Information
This is the third and final installment in a continuing series concerning product attributes and their importance to e-commerce. Previously, we discussed what product attributes are, the use of product attributes in the real, offline world, the importance of product attributes in the online world, and how site search tools should NOT obtain product attributes.
In this article, we%u2019d like to focus on the best means of obtaining product attribute information for a site search tool such as CyberSiteSearch. As discussed in the previous post, the way to not get that information is via Web crawlers (spiders), since they are poorly suited to organize detailed product content into a searchable structure across all of the products on a web site.
In our opinion (and in the opinion of Google), the best source of this information is the merchant, and the best way of obtaining that information is via a data feed. (A data feed is nothing more than a text file that contains information in a specific format.)
And since we think merchants know how to describe their products best, our technology allows the specification of a rich set of attributes to associate with each of them. And since not all products can be described using some standard set of attributes, we allow merchants to describe their products in terms of custom attributes that are appropriate for their products (like voltage, flavor, radius, intended audience, hull width, etc.)
This extensible data base architecture permits merchants to describe their products using both standard as well as custom, product specific attributes. It is an extremely powerful feature of CyberSiteSearch.
The Real Payoff
So why should an online merchant care about all of this? Because it affect sales!
We made a real effort to explain the importance of product attributes in the real(offline) world and how essential they are to commerce. The real point here is that if customers are accustomed to using attributes in the offline world, they would naturally expect to use them in the online world.
To facilitate this, a site search tool like CyberSiteSearch must implement a user interface that allows site visitors to rapidly locate desired products using their attributes.
CyberSiteSearch implements product locators that permit exactly that. Merchants can easily add product locators to their web site in the form of dropdown lists that permit specification of any set of desired attributes, and then send that information to the CyberSiteSearch software which returns all of the matching products.
By easing the navigation through products with attribute based search, merchants can significantly increase their conversion rates and revenue.
Article Source: Daily Digest Magazine
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Site Search Tools For E-Commerce Websites By CyberSiteSearch