Product Finder
A product finder or product finder is an information system that supports consumers in their decision-making when selecting product alternatives. Product finders are designed to help users determine requirements and choose one of many products. There are product finders of very different complexity, the more complex of them can be understood as a variant of decision support systems.
Traditional decision support systems are designed for specialized users (e.g. marketing managers). Product finders, on the other hand, address consumers by reducing complexity to parameters that are important to them.
Application area
A product finder is usually part of an e-shop or an Internet product presentation. As part of an e-shop, it ideally leads to an online purchase. In the case of a product presentation, the actual sale is finally made via conventional channels (e.g. in person in the shop, by telephone, etc.).
Product finders are particularly suitable for product groups whose individual products can be compared based on certain criteria. Technical products such as B. Notebooks whose properties such as clock frequency , hard drive size, price and screen size influence the purchase decision .
In addition to technical products such as notebooks, cars, dishwashers , cell phones or GPS devices, non-technical product groups such as wines, socks, toothbrushes or nails are also accessible to a product finder, provided the database contains enough comparable products.
Product Finders can only be used to a limited extent for individual products such as books, jewelery or CDs, because such products are not selected by the buyer on the basis of certain comparison criteria.
Product finders are also used to support products that are commonly referred to as “service”, for example account types for a bank, health insurance company or service provider in the telephony sector. The term service finder is occasionally used in these cases .
Product finders are used by product manufacturers, by dealers ( across manufacturers) and by Internet portals (across manufacturers and dealers).
technical realization
There are different variants with regard to the possible uses. The benefit for the consumer with the variants listed here is generally associated with technical complexity
- Guided selling systems (online product advisor, whereby the system actively leads to the purchase decision, similar to a specialist salesperson)
- Full text searches (but only suitable if the user already knows and can formulate the search terms and his purchase wishes)
- Dialog systems (general term for human-machine dialog)
- Filter systems (can filter out exactly matching products from the database, but are not suitable for product advice)
- Rating systems
Translations and related terms
"Online product advisor" or "product finder" in German have established themselves as German terms. Occasionally, the German term “ Recommendation System ” is used, but it includes various other meanings and can therefore be misunderstood.
For systems to assist in the search for services (Engl. Services . Eg types of accounts, a bank) is also sometimes the term Service Finder uses. However, since services are also often referred to as "products", the term Product Finder is also used here.
The term Product Finder is occasionally also used for price search engines , although such search engines do not actually serve to select different products, but only to select the retailer for a fixed product with regard to the cheapest price.