E-commerce search Application using Apache Solr.
The splurge in number of users counting on Ecommerce websites for shopping, has led to an unprecedented growth in online sales. Along with the amount and variety of products available online, the design of your website goes a long way in building a good, solid online business. Building a smart business website requires a lot of consideration with respect to the total experience a user gets from browsing your site. And one of the most important features is to provide an ability to locate products quickly and easily. According to Forrester statistics, around 60% of online purchases result from a customer search and about 50% of online shoppers use the site search box while shopping. Therefore, every online business needs to ensure that the website’s search tools are simple and intuitive.
An effective search function for an ecommerce site has a number of potential benefits:
• Search enables the customer to shop easily with proper navigation and filters.
• It also allows a customer to identify, qualify and compare a product with other products based on specifications and reviews.
In simpler terms, a plaintext search box is all that is needed and the rest of the job is done by the search engine. Since customers heavily rely on these search engines, they expect accurate and quick results. Therefore, an agile search engine with prospective search functionality is essential for the growth of online sales; and the strength of Apache Solr can be leveraged for this exact purpose. It’s a search platform focused on delivering enterprise class, high performance search functionality for data driven websites. It has the capability of distributed searching, fault-tolerance and load balancing; and uses standard formats like HTTP, XML and JSON for communication.