Shop search is bad

Loony

Why is This: https://www.daz3d.com/betty-baby-travel

Not listed ? I sorted it by New.

SofaCitizen

Yep, the store search often misses things it should find. There was a call for some examples of this a while back but I didn't hear if it ever lead to any changes/improvements.

felis

Usually it is better to use an external search engine.

sazzyazzca

I discovered quite by chance that some things won't show up unless the first letter is capitalized. 

Hylas

yep, search 'round here is garbage.

FirstBastion

Search has been bad for a while,  but it seems even less accurate lately.

richardandtracy

Probably costing PA's and DAZ an appreciable sum when people can't find what they want. Regards, Richard.

takezo_3001

sazzyazzca said:

I discovered quite by chance that some things won't show up unless the first letter is capitalized. 

Wait, what? That's plain silly... What we need is access to the search settings for this site as they apparently use key-LETTERS instead of words/phrases it looks like! :P

rcourtri_789f4b1c6b

richardandtracy said:

Probably costing PA's and DAZ an appreciable sum when people can't find what they want. Regards, Richard.

Maybe if PAs complain about lost sales, something would be done.  Forum complaints (so many complaints over so many years) have gotten us nowhere. 

Improving search is just not a high priority within the company.  The focus is on getting us to look at new releases.  From the end user's perspective, models and other assets from a few years ago may serve our purposes as well or better than stuff released this week, but comparison shopping within the Daz store is unnecessarily time-consuming and confusing.   Given the state of item categorization and keyword search, it's inevitable that sales are lost due to customers not finding available assets--either because searching by keyword failed to to bring up appropriate items as search results, or the search produced an excessively long list of results (including completely irrelevant items) that the searcher was unwilling to look through.

 

kraftwerkd

Shop search is pretty horrid, but not quite as bad as the forum search. Yikes. It takes less effort to set up a bbCode message board than it does to code the half-baked message boards we currently have.. and bbCode works far, far better. But I digress.

There's plenty of store examples that have sane categorizations and search functions that DAZ can just copy from - there's honestly no need to be re-inventing the wheel here, especially when it's basically a meme at this point.

kwerkx

richardandtracy said:

Probably costing PA's and DAZ an appreciable sum when people can't find what they want. Regards, Richard.

Could argue the opposite, a LOT of my early purchases were found while searching for something else.  

rcourtri_789f4b1c6b

kwerkx said:

richardandtracy said:

Probably costing PA's and DAZ an appreciable sum when people can't find what they want. Regards, Richard.

Could argue the opposite, a LOT of my early purchases were found while searching for something else.  

kwerkx, by that logic, the solution to the store search problem is to eliminate store search functions and item categorization altogether.  If you're looking for a dining room environment, you'll need to search through thousands of character models, hair models, wardrobe items, weapon props, shaders, etc.  There's always a chance you'll come across a must-have item.

From the seller's perspective, search results are more likely to generate additional sales when the search yields relevant and complete results, and when algorithms generate suggestions for additional items that make some sense.  A good supermarket or department store is well organized by item category AND picks up impulse or unplanned sales, and those principles hold true for e-commerce. 

 

kwerkx

rcourtri_789f4b1c6b said:

kwerkx said:

richardandtracy said:

Probably costing PA's and DAZ an appreciable sum when people can't find what they want. Regards, Richard.

Could argue the opposite, a LOT of my early purchases were found while searching for something else.  

kwerkx, by that logic, the solution to the store search problem is to eliminate store search functions and item categorization altogether.  If you're looking for a dining room environment, you'll need to search through thousands of character models, hair models, wardrobe items, weapon props, shaders, etc.  There's always a chance you'll come across a must-have item.

From the seller's perspective, search results are more likely to generate additional sales when the search yields relevant and complete results, and when algorithms generate suggestions for additional items that make some sense.  A good supermarket or department store is well organized by item category AND picks up impulse or unplanned sales, and those principles hold true for e-commerce. 

Not logic, just a statement.  Taking my anecdotal refection and generating head cannon about what I am thinking.. please don't.  I happen to agree that the Daz (and most other 3d asset) marketplaces could improve thier search results.  I also agree with your description of using search results to improve sales.  

Problem is IMO search against 3d assets is not easy.  Each product has words (title, description, and keywords) for a Google style text search and promo images for Pinterest style visual search.  Both rely on the PA accurately describing or depicting everything in thier product (kit bash anyone?).. an example would be those long product names seen in Amazon. Again, IMO, I doubt the product text or images (some nearly a decade old) in the Daz catalog is good enough to improve search much less similarity detection for impulse sales.

As a stop gap, I think Daz could improve categorization by annotating the catelog.  It would take a lot of time; but could be crowd sourced as a penny/percent sale.  If the categories we have (and maybe a few new ones) worked with AND/OR logic.. man that'd be great.  Search would still be a mess; but at least you could filter the whole catalog down to a reasonable subset.

I've gone and wrote too much again.  rcourtri, I hear you and look forward to the day when Daz search and categorization work great and I get inundated with impulse recommendations for more 3DU hair products.  Till then, have a good one!

Loony

Update: Now is the stroller finally added, but really not good :P