With an eye on making it easier for customers to find items among the more than 35 million SKUs featured on its site, Market America on Monday launched a new search platform that produces more relevant results, says chief operating officer Marc Ashley.
Market America, an online mass merchant and Internet marketing and product brokerage company that specializes in one-to-one marketing, implemented Microsoft's FAST ESP, which enables customers to comparison shop based on criteria such as price, color and size. The application makes it easier to quickly search the tens of millions of SKUs, including more than 2,000 branded products of Market America, No. 66 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and those from its more than 2,500 partner stores, for the best deals.
"The biggest thing with Microsoft is that out-of-the gate they provide extremely good services for merchandisers, so when our shoppers go on the site they're getting the best experience possible," Ashley says. "It comes with administrative tools for our merchandisers to really create better relevancy, to really cherry pick the types of products we want to move to the top."
Market America partners, such as Office Depot or Staples, pay to have their products placed higher in search results. "We have merchandisers for each category of product," Ashley says. "This gives each merchandiser the ability to effectively manage the results returned from those categories."
The Microsoft platform also gives Market America the ability to scale up to hundreds of millions of products, Ashley says.
"The scalability is as simple as plugging more hardware into that space to handle the load of the products being fed into the FAST system," he says. "It's very scalable."
Microsoft FAST also improves response times. "We've been testing it at a really high level of queries per second and it is fast," Ashley says. Market America found previous search platforms more sluggish in returning results.
The new search platform returns personalized search results based on a customer's attributes and behavior on previous site visits. "That really takes it to the next level," he says.
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