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Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) discuss advanced search capabities and how they work cross-platform.

Part 3 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: Let's move on now and talk a little bit about the different mediums and using search within the platform. Do you want to kick us off and talk about the different cross-platform capabilities and other things that we need to consider when we're embedding and using search within a platform and a site? 

CHRIS: Absolutely. This is a really powerful aspect of any great buying group, the capability to be omni-channel. The concept here is making it so that it's really easy for your users to find what they're looking for, when they're looking for it, on the device that they're looking for it on. Now, a lot of our clients will use a responsive or progressive web app type of format to present their site. Having a standard interface that is desktop friendly. It's going to work well on a tablet, it's going to work well on a mobile device, and it's going to run through a web browser.  

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CHRIS: However, we also are very capable of leveraging our standard capability within a mobile application that will work very nicely on iOS or Android, that works well for tablet and mobile devices, and it can just tie into that same data set in that same search capability. As far as the user is concerned, the main thing here is that we want to present them with a consistent user experience and a user interface no matter where the group buying platform appears. Ultimately what we're trying to do is make it so that, if they're in the warehouse or if they're at a franchise location, and they need to order something, they can order it right away. They can authenticate, log in, get the search results that are specific to their account and their pricing.  

Keep in mind, we want the buyers group platform to show things like inventory levels and lead times for shipment and their specific pricing all within the search. So it needs to leverage all the things we've been talking about with all of the integrations and the data integrity and making sure it is specific to that account and possibly even that user.  

Maybe we don't want to show anything to that particular user for this exact product because they don't have access to that from their boss. Their boss has not allowed them to make these types of purchases. That's just an example. Like you said earlier with the TVs, maybe we just want to present them with the 12 things that they can purchase for that franchise location that they've selected. 

So whatever the situation is that you're wanting to complete, we want to be able to have consistency around how everything is presented to the buyers group user, whether it's a responsive application, progressive web application, or it's truly a multi-platform application where we're using an iOS and Android application in addition to the web application. We can also do point-of-sale. It really just depends on what you're needing.  

At the end of the day, though, the questions that we want to ask are, “Does the search information provide insight?” And think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of your user. What exactly are they looking for? They don't want anything super complicated. They just need what they need, and it needs to be relevant to their situation and they want it to be intuitive. 

So, do you use the search information to actually improve the site? And just going back to that statistic about how many people are ready to buy whenever they search, and how underserved they are on most websites, including group buyers platforms. We want that experience, that advanced search capability to be true, on a mobile device and a tablet device in addition to a desktop. You need to be able to present it in a way that the filters and the autocomplete will show up intuitively and work across all the different devices. Right, Ron? 

RON: Yeah, I've got a great example here. I'm going to bring up a screenshot. This is a customer that we designed—it's probably been about eight years ago. But I remember when he called me originally, he was spending over $3 million a year on 24/7 phone support because the plumbers couldn't find the part that they were looking for on their website. He had over 50 million SKUs in his database.

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RON: So we designed and built a new site, and on this home page you can see we provided five different ways for them to find what they're looking for. So up here in the header, you can see, here's a part number search. Down here on the right you can see there's a model number search. At the bottom you can see all the different icons for the manufacturer. Up top you can see we broke it apart, the different types of heaters, so you could go in and traverse.

We even had a buyers group Wizard that says, “If you still don't know what you're looking for, click here and let's start.” And they could go through, answer a couple of questions, and we'll find their part. So in that particular case, we actually built separate and unique search indexes to provide different search results based on the piece of information the plumber had when they were looking for a part. 

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CHRIS: Again, does the search information provide insight and does the information improve the site? And in this particular case, with 50 million SKUs and so many parts, every search provided too many results. So we started breaking those results apart. If they were only looking for a specific mobile number instead of fuzzy logic showing 700 parts that might be close to that number, we literally only had those results of the model numbers, right? That was just one way to improve that.  

So now that we've done step one, and there's almost a two-step process. We can go back and talk about the TVs if we want because I think that's a great one. So let’s say I go to Bestbuy.com. I'm looking to buy a big new OLED TV for the Super Bowl coming up. So I go, I search OLED TV, I hit enter, and up pops—and I know they don't have this many—but let's say up popped a thousand results. Well, now how do I pick between those thousand results...and that's really step two. That's now the filters.  

So let's talk about filters for group buying platforms, what they are, and their purpose. For me, the easy answer is to help fine-tune or narrow my search results. That's really what it is, right? So I go to Best Buy or Fry's, I type in OLED TVs. I get too many results. I know that I'm looking for something specific. I know my stand only fits a TV up to five inches. Well then, I might want to be able to go to a filter on the other side and say, “I'm looking between 40- and 50-inch TVs.” Right? Real simple.

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RON: Click the filter. Now, it comes down to now there's 200 TVs. OK, well now I know I don't want to pay more than $700 or $800. So I say, “Show me everything that's between $600 and $800.” And then it shows me the results and or I can look to the side and at the right of each filter and I'll bring a screenshot up, you can see this on one of our sites in our platform. You can see here on any of the attributes or any of the categories and subcategories you can see in parentheses to the right, there's a count. 

If I went in and there were a thousand TVs, then I would be able to go over to the count and go, “Oh, I can see that there are 43 TVs that are between $1000 and $1500. I can see that there are 27 TVs between $900 and $1000, 13 TVs between $700 and $800, whatever. I can see the results of all these categories. 

That's where those filter numbers really help out, because instead of having to click and select multiple filters and go all kinds of crazy to find stuff, I can very quickly look at the left-hand side, look at my filters. For example, I've got one called genre. I added a few books to my demo site here, and so very quickly, if I open up the genre tab, I can see there's four books there, and I can see which books and how many there are in each category of comedy, satire, whatever. And that's very easy to do with filters.  

So filters are what help dynamically control and fine-tune the results of your search on any eCommerce platform. There are a number of different ways to show filters. They can be shown, like within our platform, filters could be hard-coded and brought in. Filters can be both dependent and non-dependent. For example, if I wanted to go buy some new appliances and I went to Home Depot or Lowes.com online and I'm looking at appliances, am I tied only to brand? I might want to go in and click on Whirlpool or Samsung or whatever the brand is that I picked, and it filters everything out and now I can go pick my appliance set.  

Or am I not specifically dependent on brand? I want to go click an attribute called stainless, because I've really I got my heart set on that Bosch dishwasher, and I know that Bosch doesn't make all the other [appliances in the set]. So I'm looking more for like a Viking stove and a Thermidor fridge and a Bosch dishwasher. I'm looking for really high-end stuff, but I'm going to mix and match. But I do want them all to be stainless. And so I'm going to click on a non-dependent filter called stainless, and now it'll show me all my stainless options across not only all the different appliances, but all the different manufacturers. 

Maybe I want to pick the fridge first. So now I'll click stainless, but then I'll click refrigerators, and so I can just do that. And then there's too many refrigerators. So then I might either click a price range to buy only the high-end, or I might just pick three of my favorite brands, or I might only pick side by side. 

So you can see that filters become extremely powerful when we start fine tuning and honing in on purchases on a buyers group platform, right? It's like I go to the car dealer, I want to buy a car today. I need to buy a car. I'm just not sure, do I want leather? Do I want the sunroof? What color do I want? Do I want to upgrade the wheels? You're fine tuning. Those are the filters. Once you get there and you test drive and you see the price difference between each model, do I get the DX, the LX, the EX, what am I going to get that's filtering, right?  

We're now honing in. I still want to buy a car. My intent’s there. I searched, I did my research. I know. I want a Honda. I'm at the dealership, and now I'm into the filter mode where I'm filtering through all the different options that I might want for whichever Honda I'm going to buy. 

Continue to Part 4 to discover how powerful filters are.

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