E-Commerce Business Owners Request For Opinion

[ultrasounder]

Hello TUNEF Entrepreneurs,
Congratulations on striking it out , breaking the shackles of servitude and adding Value to Your customer's lives. If Your e-commerce site runs on Wordpress/Shopify/woocommerce/ Bigcommerce/Magento/Squarespace/Wix , I have a quick question to ask in order to understand Your single most annoying pain point.

Background-
I am a quality developer at a MNC(living the scripted life), but am trying to become an unscripted entrepreneur myself. I have good experience in back-end development especially with regards to Enterprise search. My day to day job is to tune our Search service(built on top of ELK stack) thereby improving the search performance for our quality system. The quality database(SQL Server) stores primarily text but some pictures too(very rare). And before my time, apparently the system ran so slow as to be deemed virtually unusable. If THIS is how You describe Your current search experience, then I can empathize with You and most importantly Your customer. But there is hope. Search need not suck. Rather, it can be your own secret weapon to offer "SUCS" customer support to your customers. And when it comes to Information Retrieval(Search is one such system), nothing comes close to Elasticsearch. There are tried and tested ways to integrate Elasticsearch to Your X-Commerce website(insert any of the big names from the second line here!!!), BUT its non-trivial. And also, while You are integrating Elasticsearch into your site(Elastic is the "E" in the ELK stack Lucene and Kibana are the L and K), why not add features such as ;

1. Semantic Search. Your customer need not know exactly what they are looking for prior to searching for some specific thing. The search engine interprets their query for them and presents the most relevant query result(Google Magic).
2. Similarity Search.Return similar items along with the original search item. If Your customer searches for a particular pair of sock, return closely matching sock based on "Features"(a fancy Machine learning term for image or text attributes) without inundating Your page with all Your socks.
3. Sentence completion. You don't have to be GOOGLE/AMAZON/FB/NETFLIX/MSFT to implement this. Customer starts typing, the search engine offers sentence completion.
4. Lastly, have you always wanted to deploy a "chatbot" on top of Your search? My proposed solution makes it possible for customers to engage with Your content(corpus) and have meaningful information exchange. Your search engine should offer a low impedance path for information to flow from Your datastore to the search results.

Proposed Solution -
Depending on your e-commerce provider, there might be integrations already available or at least developer APIs to integrate Elastic. If Your e-commerce is one of those that has an integration available, then we would have to;
(a) Hook-up elastic to Your backend database
(b) Plug-in my ML solution to "better index" the data that is already being indexed by Elasticsearch resulting in at least 10x search performance improvement and enable semantic search features.
If an integration is not already available, then we would have to perform an extra step of integrating Elasticsearch into your platform and perform steps a) and b) from above.

Next Steps-
I have created this really simple Google Forms with a few straightforward questions for you to answer. Based on those responses, I can work with You and Your team to chart the best logical path forward to improve Your search engine capability. It should'nt take more than a couple of minutes(no trick questions ). I am collecting Your emails in the form, BUT if You are not comfortable giving it away, You can always ping me on the forum or PM me. DMs open. I guarantee I wont sell your information or SPAM You. Just like You, I have read the TMF and Unscripted and wont engage in devious business practices.

I Thank You very much for reading through my posting. I lookforward to Your responses AND help You in your endeavors to improve search performance for Your customers.

In case You missed the link to the survey form above, Here it is. E-Commerce Search
Sincerely,
Ananth

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)