Internal - Product Search and How It Works

What is Product Search

Product search is an enhancement to ShipServ Search allowing buyers search for products as well as suppliers. If a supplier has a catalogue in their profile, the contents of their catalogue is now surfaced at a global search level, not just searchable from within their profile.

Who is product search for?

Unlike Supplier search where the intent is to find suppliers typically for particular categories and brands, product search is designed for the use case of finding specific products (and subsequently a supplier) by part numbers / codes and well as generic product terms such as "neo-type band saw blade", "safety shoes" and "cable tray".

Product search is new to ShipServ.com and we'll be collecting data to understand how buyers search and their intent behind the search to drive further iterations.

What's the future for product search?

This is just the first step in a long journey. Product search will evolve with Zone into a full marketplace facilitating sourcing and trade.

Note: The current product search displays products from supplier catalogues. In time catalogues via Zone will fully replace current catalogues.

For more details on the upcoming plans for Zone, reach out to Javier Garcia-Plata.

How Ranking Works

What's displayed is based on relevancy for a buyers search term. There is no curation, personalisation, manipulation or boosting of the products displayed for particular suppliers - these will come at a later date in the wider scope of Zone.

What's searchable and how does it make a difference to relevancy

The table below details the searchable fields and their relative weighting with respect relevancy for natural language searches. Relevancy is based on the combination of proximity to the search term against all searchable fields (i.e. how close the search term is to the field label) and its weighting.

Note: Spec sheets data is not currently searchable.

What else makes a difference to ranking?

Alongside the relevancy against searchable fields, boosts are applied for products that meet the following criteria. The below table details boost criteria and their effect, mutually exclusive from the relative weighting of searchable attributes.

The criteria are chosen to priortise better populated products offering buyers better product data ahead of poorly populated products. Boosts impact the rankings but do not guarantee 'top spots' as they are applied in combination with the relevancy score based on searchable fields.

General Q&A

I know a product has an image, but it showed a placeholder… is it broken!?

No, it's not broken. If you refresh the page after a few seconds then the images will display.

We generate the product images 'on demand' when intent is shown to ensure fast loading and avoid storing images for products that have never or will never be seen.

The first time a product is shown it will not have an image. When shown it triggers generation of the image. The next time that same product is show to any person, they will see the image. Image generation typically only takes a few seconds, but can take up to a minute.

Note: If after a few minutes the image does not display, this may be a bug and should be raised to support.

For the purpose of demos to suppliers, it's advised to perform a few searches upfront to ensure that the products display their images. Albeit, it's likely that someone has already seen their products and the images will already be generated.

Are there any advertising features… like featured products?

Not yet! We'll be introducing product based advertising within the scope of Zone at a later date.

How product search effect spotlights?

It doesn't, product search is mutually exclusive to supplier search. Spotlights are designed to promote for supplier listings. The use case for promoting products will be introduced alongside other advertising add-ons as above.

It's just like Google where there are different 'promotion products' for the different types of searches (website pages - all tab and the product list - shopping tab).

For any concerns or queries on how product search correlates or impacts existing contracts, please reach out to Carsten Schmidt.

Does product search compete with supplier search for profile views?

No. Product search is designed to provide additional value to buyers beyond searching suppliers. Suppliers with catalogues, in particular those with good quality catalogues, may see increases in their traffic to their profiles.

60% of profile views are referred from Google and other search engines. 21% of profile views are from searches within ShipServ.

Are products 'exposed' to Google?

Not yet. We have plans in the wider scope of Zone to expose products to Google and other search engines. As the current catalogues of suppliers are generally low quality, exposing them to Google without careful consideration could damage reputation of ShipServ.com and subsequently impact traffic to supplier profiles and banner views.

Whilst we plan to expose the products, the search engines themselves choose what to index based on a multitude of factors including quality of data and demand on the search engine. In our product Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) project we will be applying best practices to promote product visibility in Google. SEO is a science. Google have a great site on How Google Search Works which offers a great starting point to understand search engines for those of you intrigued.

Note: Spec Sheets are exposed to Google today, in-fact they get lost of impressions and clicks on Google.

Will we be releasing instructions or help articles on How to Search?

No, we don't currently have plans to educate users on how to do a search as it's just like Google. There are plans to educate users on take full advantage of product search which will be considered in the wider marketing materials in Zone.

Note: We do track what people search for in the help centre. Should we see demand for understanding how to search within the help centre we'll certainly publish an article. We want to avoid filling the help centre with articles that get no traffic and ensure that what is published is reflects the demand and offers value.

In due course we will be publishing an article in the help centre for suppliers on how to improve their catalogues to be relevant for buyers. The intention of this article is to provide an understanding for ShipMates.

Are you adding a 'tiered' category filter, just like Amazon, Ebay and all the other marketplaces have?

Yes, absolutely! This will be for the new catalogues via Zone as it's dependent on uniform category data across products. The current folders in the existing catalogues, representative of category, are not uniform and prevent such functionality at this moment.