We announced today a new program that permits online merchants to evaluate how e-commerce site search would boost sales on their site. The program is free of charge and requires little or no effort on the part of the merchant.

Under this Site Search Prototyping Program, an online merchant can actually see how his products would be presented in search results and how Reinhart Technology’s CyberSiteSearch E-Commerce site search tool facilitates their purchase. An online store owner simply sends his product data and Reinhart’s staff sets up an actual live e-commerce site search of his products for evaluation. This is accomplished in such a way that there is absolutely no disruption to the live online store.

Prior to this plan, merchants would have to imagine how this technology would be applied to their site and products by viewing canned demos or a sample of other merchants’ sites and products. This program has been launched to eliminate the natural uncertainty that a storeowner might have concerning the use of this technology with his products and his site.

You can read today’s full press release here.

We’ve recently added new features to CyberSiteSearch that permit easy customization of search results.

With these new features, merchants have complete control over the appearance and content of product search results. Examples of how this feature might be used include:

• Implementing multiple “buy now” buttons on each product search result, such as for the site’s own shopping cart, Pay Pal, and Google Checkout.
• Add a “New” or other attention graphic to specific products results.
• Adding a drop down list of product options.
• Showing multiple images for each product.

The combination of our product’s robust handling of merchant defined product attributes with this new enhanced customization feature permits merchants to show attribute information in search results such as color, voltage, flavor, pattern, axle diameter, or any other attribute they wish to define.

Best of all, this powerful new feature can typically be implemented using simple HTML.

You can read today’s press release here.

In response to a few comments that we’ve received, here are links to the full series of postings that we did about Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search, listed in chronological order. It’s a lot easier to read in this fashion.

• So What Are Product Attributes?
• Product Attributes In The Real World
• Product Attributes In The Online World
• How Site Search Tools Should Not Obtain Product Attribute Information
• How Site Search Tools Should Obtain Product Attribute Information
• Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search Tools: The Real Payoff

This is the final installment in our series concerning product attributes and their importance to e-commerce merchants. In previous posts 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, how site search tools should NOT obtain product attributes, and the way to best obtain product attribute information.

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.

This is the fifth in a continuing series of blog posts 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’d 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.

In our next post, we’ll discuss how we utilize product attributes to assist site visitors to rapidly locate and purchase products.

This is the fourth in a continuing series of blog posts 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, and the importance of product attributes in the online world.

Obviously, a site search tool like CyberSiteSearch must obtain product attribute information to be able to use it in searches. Today, we’ll briefly discuss how not to obtain that information.

As stated in one of Google’s official blogs:

“Before, there was simple web crawling which involved indexing the content on a website. But there were challenges: sometimes the web crawler could not find all pages on a site, and, even if a page was crawled, it was often difficult for a computer-based system to understand the meaning of the content.”

Think about this: how could a search engine spider examine every page on a merchant site, digest all of the information on each and every page, and attach real meaning (attribute values) to words and phrases found on the page?

How could a search engine spider possibly know that the word “lilac” is a scent and not a color? Or “fair trade” is a specific certification given to coffee? Or 6 inches is a diameter and not a length?

Web crawlers are poorly suited to organize detailed product content into a searchable structure across all of the products on a web site.

But merchants can, and that is the topic of our next post.

This is the third of a series of blog posts concerning product attributes. Previously, we discussed what product attributes are, and the use of product attributes in the real, offline world. Today, we wish to cover how product attributes can be employed in the online world to facilitate commercial success.

Product attributes are essential to commerce in the real, offline world. They are so important that we use them all the time. In fact, they are so important and ubiquitous that we use them without thought.

So how could a web merchant expect to be successful without mimicking the offline world by supporting product attributes in the online store?

In our view, supporting product attributes in site search is absolutely essential, since customers express their interest in products using them. CyberSiteSearch has been designed from the beginning to provide comprehensive support for product attributes.

In fact, we implement an extensible data base solution that allows merchants to specify any set of attributes that makes sense for their product mix. These attributes are used in site searches to help site visitors to rapidly locate and purchase products, using the vocabulary that is most natural to employ for the type of product.

But of course, we must first obtain product attribute information before making it available in site search. That will be the topic of our next installment.

Last week we wrote in the CyberSiteSearch Blog about Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search: So What Are Product Attributes. Today I’d like to further explain and illustrate how attributes are used in the real offline world.

Imagine standing in a gourmet store and overhearing a customer speaking to a sales clerk and saying this:

“I’d like a caffeinated, whole bean, dark roast, full bodied coffee, for my morning brew. I don’t drink too much, so a smaller package would be great. Oh by the way, I try to be socially responsible and purchase only Fair Trade certified coffee. What would you recommend?”

Now imagine overhearing this at the cosmetics counter at a department store:

“I’m interested in a nice body cream or perfume for my wife. She really likes honeysuckle. What do you have?”

Then imagine listening to this at you local drug store:

“I’m looking for the replacement cleaning cartridge for the Braun model 7550 shaver; the two pack would be great if you carry them.”

In each of these examples, the customer stated his desires using the vocabulary that was appropriate for the type of product. For coffee, the customer spoke in terms of caffeination, grind, roast, size, and special certification. The cosmetics customer spoke in terms of format (cream or perfume), scent, and audience gender. The cleaning cartridge shaver customer spoke in terms of product type, manufacturer, model number, and packaging.

In each example, the sales clerk would respond by showing the customer the subset of all products that met the customers stated desires.

The first important point here is that each customer used a vocabulary comprised of product attributes to clearly express interest in products and that resulted in the narrowing of his attention to the products that fit those attributes.

The second and more important point is that it’s likely that you would not give a second thought to overhearing any of these conversations, since they are all very natural interactions well within our experience. This is the more important point because it illustrates the fact that in the real offline world we naturally use product attributes in commerce every single day and don’t give it a second thought.

This is the first of a series of posts that explain product attributes, their importance to e-commerce success, and how CyberSiteSearch supports them. Today’s post focuses on the fundamental concept of product attributes.

A product attribute is anything that you might use to describe a product.

Some attributes are common across all products. For example, price is something you would typically use to help describe any product for sale.

However, most attributes are specific to the type of product being sold. Some examples:

• for a battery we might use voltage, type (AAA, D, etc.)
• for a boat we would use hull width, length, horsepower, etc.
• for perfume we would use scent, size, etc.
• for coffee we would use caffeination, roast, grind, flavor, etc.
• for a pair of men’s slacks we would use waist size, length, etc,

Think about the importance of these attributes to each type of product. Can you imagine trying to shop for a battery without specifying the required voltage? Or how about shopping for a perfume without considering the scent?

Also, notice how mutually exclusive they can be. You would never think about using voltage to describe a coffee, nor would you scent to describe a boat.

So we can say that attributes comprise the vocabulary that we use to describe products and that vocabulary differs significantly by product type, much like the vocabulary words in a language vary from language to language.

So why do we care about this? Because product attributes are important. In fact, they are so very, very important that we don’t even consciously think about using them. We just do it. And we do it all the time.

If you’d like to quickly and easily monitor your web site’s position for a few search terms, you can’t beat Rank Checker. It’s a Firefox add on that easy very easy to install and run. Basically you need only specify the domain name and keywords and it will report back within seconds the site’s ranking in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

We use it to check our own search positioning. For example, it took only about 15 seconds or so to check the positioning of CyberSiteSearch for the phrase “ecommerce site search”. (The results were we are in number 2 position in Google, number 4 in Yahoo, and number 1 in MSN Live.)

It’s lightweight, easy to use, fast, and free. You can’t beat it.