enhanced search shopping carts

[muraenoc]

I am looking at building a site using a prebuilt shopping cart for a food coop with about 17,000 items. So the shopping cart needs to have a robust search function. Does anyone have suggestions, or past experience of issues to watch out for. The developing environment does not matter. But since it is a natural food coop they are price sensitive as well. The wholesale company they buy from does not provide a data feed, or any pictures. (they are going to add the pictures) they will have a csv file to upload. any suggestions are appreciated. This is my first post in this forum. thanks

[brian.mark]

There are plenty of third parties that do decent search for sites, and there is always Google's hardware search appliance (mini or otherwise). But I haven't seen too many shopping carts that really have a good search built in.

If you don't mind a hosted solution, the search at MonsterCommerce has always seemed fairly decent.

Brian.

[muraenoc]

thanks for the reply. interesting idea about monstercommerce. I also have not found good search capablilities in a shopping cart. What third party search ad ons do you recomend. thanks

[brian.mark]

http://www.nextopia.com/

This one is newer, but it looks pretty good. They have the "Narrowing" options like many of the top sites use to help find products based on criteria that the shopper chooses.

http://www.sli-systems.com/

SLI offers a "Learning" search. As people search and choose a product, it learns trends and starts to tailor the results to those trends.

Personally, I went with a Google Mini.
http://mini.google.com/

They're all decent, and the first two have free trials available. The Google one is hardware, so you can host it at a datacenter or over cable / dsl. You can totally customize it pretty easily, too.

If you want to see some sites that use each, let me know. They list a few on their own sites, but I know some of the guys at SLI from attending conferences and know of another customer using the nextopia that isn't listed. Last I heard, google uses our tool site as part of the mini demonstration.

Brian.