Types of product discovery

10 minutes

The various types of product discovery are described in the following sections.

Multi-tenant search service

The multi-tenant search service allows you to provide better relevance and searches across the attributes of products. Multi-tenant search enables multiple clients (tenants) to use the same site to find their products. Each of the online stores can customize their part of the site by defining their product catalog. For example, if you want to search for shoes from multiple stores, you can search based on the Size and Color attributes and can see all products based on those attributes with their deals and promotions from the different stores.

Internet scale and performance

By integrating with Bing, Commerce can provide improved performance and cloud-powered search capabilities on a global scale. Bing for Commerce achieves this objective by using Microsoft AI technology and Bing intelligence to drive the search process and provide intelligent product searches, custom visual searches and personalization, and product recommendations. It also presents a straightforward way for customers to find your store faster and learn about your products.

Better relevance

In an existing order in Store Commerce, and in the online channel, notice that you are able to see direct links to the products. With these links, you are able to show orders that provide more than just the basic information and expand the shopping experience, based on the integration with Bing search.

Attribute-based search

The attributes identify the type of data that can be entered for a specific attribute. Different attribute types exist on which you can search the product such as text, currency, and numerical values. For example, if a certain product with an On sale attribute exists, and that On sale attribute is set to Yes or No, you would be able to search for the product based on this attribute. This feature enables you to set additional criteria to your search and get back more precise results.

Sort and refine search and browse results

Search relevance and performance are key factors in the omnichannel experience because product discovery relies primarily on search functionality for information retrieval and content navigation. An effective browse and search experience helps increase conversion by having quick access to relevant results, by enabling more predictive product search, showing the possible related products that a customer might be interested in, and finding the desired products from the browse history.

By using faceted navigation, customers can browse for content by filtering on different refiners that are linked to terms in a term set. By applying the refiners, the customer can view a summary of their choices. By using faceted navigation, you can configure different refiners for different terms in a term set without having to create additional pages.

In Commerce, customers can discover links to products before they have finished typing. Commerce also supports functionality for keyword matches in various categories that let customers see the number of matching keywords across categories and trigger a search for a keyword in other categories.

Enhanced sorting in Commerce lets customers sort, search, and browse search results, and then refine them by criteria such as price, product name, and product number. Customers can also sort results based on whether a product is new, best-selling, or recently added.

Custom sorting is also available and can be done based on: