Your Advanced Search Companion to WebSphere Commerce with IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition

Are your customers having problems to find products in your website? Or do you want to build a faceted navigation for your catalog but don’t know where to start? Read on and you will find what you have been looking for….

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In the past couple years, I’ve been implementing several projects for our clients with the IBM Omnifind Discovery Edition (ODE) and WebSphere Commerce to enhance the search experience for their customers. And here’re some of my findings of why ODE will be the right choice for online retailers to resolve their headaches in the search area.

The understanding of Commerce tables

It might take developers anywhere from a few days to couple weeks to setup a search engine just to understand the data of your commerce site. However, with ODE, the basic setup can be done fairly quickly and easily by just setting up the database connection in the configuration file – default.prp. ODE for WebSphere Commerce handles all the dirty works behind the scene.  Less setup time means developers can spend more time to focus on their actual development work. But don’t get me wrong, ODE is not a product targeting only WebSphere Commerce, the product is versatile enough to work with other platforms, no matter if the data set is structure or un-structure.

A set of handy API for customization

ODE comes with two choices of implementation, you can either choose to use the Layout Editor if the original out of the box look and feel fulfill your needs, or you could build it with the APIs. I personally prefer the latter one, mainly due to the degree of flexibility this provides.  More often than not, customers propose unique requirements (for branding or competitive edge) that lend itself to use the flexible API.

Faceted navigation, a new standard to drive your catalog.

A lot of times, when you physically visit a shop, you will encounter a salesperson and he or she would come over and ask how he/she may help you.  How can you provide the same type of personal shopping experience with your website?  I would say the faceted navigation can be used to simulate this experience.  Faceted navigation can guide your customer to narrow down the product that they are looking for on your site, and at the end it helps you to gain satisfaction from your customers. ODE has a concept called “features”, it will group all the related features and build the faceted navigation for the search term that you have requested. With a little trick, you can use the search engine to drive your category pages which automatically build a faceted navigation for category browsing. Comparing this with the old fashion breadcrumb, you can guide your customers to find their specific needs during their browsing and searching and truly provides for an experience like they are actually at the brick and mortar store.

What else …

The respelling feature and the capability to tune the system by setting up your own vocabulary are some other features that our clients are ecstatic about.  In the future, I’m going to blog more details in those areas as well as some other features and challenges that I’ve experienced in my projects.