Products: ISYS:web Organization: MEDmarketplace.com Industry: Healthcare Data: 30,000+ medical products covering hundreds of product categories Benefit: Stronger usability, longer site visits and increased sales via fast, accurate search and navigation

A Bustling Online Marketplace
MEDmarketplace.com, Inc. is a host website that brings together buyers and sellers of new and used medical equipment.  The site was launched in 2002 to meet the market needs of the medical equipment industry and caters to all corners of the healthcare market – business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer.

The site is a one-stop-shop for those in need of buying or selling medical equipment and hospital equipment.  The online marketplace contains a dedicated online store called the Sell-It! Showcase, where buyers and sellers meet to fill their medial supply needs.  The website also enhances the user experience by providing additional product knowledge with classified directory listings that cover a wide range of medical related fields and related categories in the MEDdirectory.  MEDmarketplace.com also facilitates sales transactions and lead generation between willing sellers and buyers.

Starting From Scratch
When MEDmarketplace.com was first built in 2002, the company implemented a basic ASP database search tool, as their budget and available resources only allowed for a simple search component.  With the ASP database search tool, searches worked well, but only when there was an exact match to one keyword.  In addition, the ASP search tool only returned results based on a keyword’s position in the database, not by relevancy.  With only a few hundred products on its website, MEDmarketplace.com had already begun to notice inaccuracies in its search results.  With the added complexities of increased product listings, multiple-word queries and misspelled data, the company realized it needed a more sophisticated search product. 

At the time, the company’s web developer told MEDmarketplace.com there was no "magic out-of-the-box solution" to solve its search issues.  To the frustration of its customers and the company itself, from 2003 to 2005, MEDmarketplace.com relied upon varying constructions of the same basic ASP search to get the job done.  In 2006, the company revisited the issue, desperate for a better solution.

Evaluating, Bending and Stretching
MEDmarketplace.com conducted an initial web-based search to gather information about the different enterprise search engines available.  The team poured over software reviews, industry articles and vendor websites.  Several criteria were established, the most important being a search engine that is both customizable and cost-effective. 

After testing several products on its own server, ISYS Search Software emerged as a favorite.  One of ISYS’ core products, ISYS:web, enabled full functionality out of the box and still allowed for extensive tweaking and customization.  Not only did ISYS offer the search functionality needed, but it was a good answer to MEDmarketplace.com’s dilemma – the company needed a quick fix, but also the ability to enhance the search capabilities of its website over time. 

“ISYS combines easy-to-use software with powerful and robust searching tools,” said JM Baratta, co-founder and chief technical officer, MEDmarketplace.com.  “Additionally, ISYS’ technical support team – during our trial period and continuing throughout our use of the product – has been outstanding.  They have gone above and beyond to ensure we are happy with the product.”

ISYS:web was first implemented in the summer of 2006 as a general product search on its website.  ISYS was configured to automatically update its index every 15 minutes through a direct link to specific fields in MEDmarketplace.com’s MS SQL server.  When a product search is initiated on the website, MEDmarketplace.com uses ISYS to retrieve, sort and filter individual data fields from its database, instead of crawling web pages. 

Stage two of the ISYS implementation included enabling more features and molding ISYS’ search engine to work for the specific requirements of the website.  Today, MEDmarketplace.com uses ISYS to display on-demand lists of products based on specific criteria, which lets users browse the site in an individualized way via a taxonomy.  When a user browses the company’s site, ISYS is quietly retrieving specific records in the background based on, for example, the category selected by the user.  For example, a list of specific products, say hospital monitors, is pulled up by ISYS when users click through a taxonomy of three to four levels.  Once a list is revealed, users can search, sort and filter the results to determine what is most relevant.

“While we did not originally intend to use ISYS as a browsing search function, it has been an easy-to-implement and useful feature,” said Baratta.  “The complicated aspect of this feature is in ISYS’ ability to generate results that are accurate and up-to-the-minute, in each category.  This function has tested ISYS’ flexibility to the max, and we have been extremely pleased at the resilience of the technology.”  

MEDmarketplace.com has also implemented ISYS’ analytics function, which enables the web team at the company to monitor user behavior and adjust the website accordingly.  The team is able to view ascending/descending searches and how information has been filtered and sorted. 

“It helps us to keep an eye on our users’ experience so we can ensure positive interactions with our website” said Baratta.

Contributing to The Bottom Line
Since the company's website has 30,000 products covering hundreds of different product categories, ISYS serves a vital role in MEDmarketplace.com’s usability success.  Daily, thousands of users pass through ISYS on some level -- whether they actively type a query into the search box or passively browse the site’s taxonomy.

“We purchased the annual support plan and it has been well worth our money,” said Baratta.  “ISYS’ technical support team is efficient and knowledgeable, often solving our issues in one or two days and alerting us to features of this product we were unaware existed.”

In a year’s time, ISYS has already doubled the "stick time" of MEDmarketplace.com visitors.  Page views and sales on the website have both consistently grown in positive directions. 

“ISYS provided a robust, out-of-the-box solution to combat our search problems,” said Baratta.  “We were able to easily configure ISYS to read from our database and display results on our website in a completely customized layout.  It provides advanced indexing and searching capabilities typically only found on more expensive and complex applications.  We’re thoroughly and continually impressed.”