How custom search technology helps tame a quarter-million SKUs online

Stocking its site with purchases from merchandise consolidators, wholesalers and distributors, publishers and retailers–-some 30,000 independent retailers and 130 publishers in the U.S. alone--art poster site Barewalls.com has amassed some 250,000 SKUs, a potentially daunting prospect for shoppers simply trying to choose a print to fill a spot over the mantle. But choose and buy they do, with 5-year-old Barewalls reaching profitability in 2001 and looking at 20% growth so far this year over last.

Five years in the industry have taught Barewalls that the way people shop for art online is much different from how they shop for sweaters or books. “We used to think that people know exactly what they want: give them a keyword and they’ll find it,” says CEO Lorne Lieberman. “But the truth is, you need to get into the consumers’ mind set to figure out how to help them.”

Part of Barewalls’ solution rests in a home-grown, one of a kind search engine that lets site visitors shop by art genre, subject, price, and an ever-growing series of top 10 lists that narrow the site’s enormous collection in a variety of ways.

Supporting the engine is a strict cataloging system that bridges the worlds of art history and information science. It’s built on controlled vocabulary, a concept borrowed from library science that orders and limits the words used to describe items.

“Without that consistency, you get haphazard cataloging and different results over time. You can browse our site associatively, and that’s one of our unique aspects,” says co-founder Dan Spira. “When we started building the company we had to build a lot of this ourselves, and now we’re glad we did.”

The system works well enough to keep consumers coming back to the site in increasing numbers. Barewalls now gets approximately 1 million unique visitors per month, about 40,000 a day, and serves up about 10 million individual pages per month.