Semantic Product Search

Ept Computing is creating breakthrough search technology which will revolutionise e-commerce.

You want to buy something online, but you don't exactly know what it's called — you know the problem. The search box gives you either thousands of results or none at all. The categories which you can browse seem arbitrary and irrelevant, and the “advanced search” function has hundreds of options, none of which are useful.

Online shopping is great when you know precisely what you want; however, if you have a need but don't know which products best meet that need, traditional e-commerce websites are terrible. For example, if your coffee machine is broken, you just want a machine which will make good coffee, and you don't care whether it has a conical gold tone filter and a precision thermostat. When your mother-in-law's birthday is looming, you just want to get something she will like, but you don't even know whether to start looking for a gift in the Home & Garden, the Fashion or the Health & Beauty department. When shopping for wine and you're not a complete expert, you'll have no idea whether a Côtes du Rhône–Villages will go with your Beef Bourguignon.

Every good salesperson knows that they can't sell a product based on its features — they have to figure out the customer's needs, ask questions to get to know them, give personal and relevant recommendations, and react to the customer's feedback by refining the offering.

Nevertheless, the majority of e-commerce websites today try to sell based on features, while actually they would do better by focussing on customer need.

But why?

Designing the user experience of an online shop is hard enough if there are a few hundred different products, but when there are tens of thousands, coping with that choice is a real challenge. The traditional approach of dealing with such complexity in e-commerce has been to simply show customers whatever information the database can provide. Keyword search and multi-faceted (guided) navigation can be used to narrow down the choice based on features, but this will only help you if you already know exactly which features you want.

E-commerce is highly competitive business, and for online retailers it is vital to keep customers loyal while protecting margins. A great user experience of a shopping website adds real value — if customers can find what they want quickly and easily, they will come back. By meeting shoppers' needs, online retailers can gain a huge competitive advantage.

Needs-based e-commerce

Ept Computing's product search technology is a revolution in e-commerce. It does what a human salesperson would do: try to understand the customer's needs and then show them the things they want. It lets the customers use their own way of thinking and their own way of expressing themselves.

We call it semantic product search because it works by using the semantics, that is the meaning, of words. Traditional keyword search doesn't understand the things you type in — it just finds that literal phrase, and if you're lucky maybe misspellings. Our technology is different: we analyse the needs and preferences you provide, we understand the meaning of product features, and through statistics gathered from many users our system can automatically learn which solution best suits which needs.

Think of it as a salesperson who knows everything, who's unbiased and not pushy, who listens patiently and who can give you personal recommendations in an instant. All within a nifty piece of software, coming soon to an online shopping website near you.

Sounds awesome? We think it is. Please contact us to find out more.