Customer Spotlight:
QVC Customers Find What They Need With Texis
Most Americans know QVC by its shopping channel on television.
QVC's web site, however, also is one of the most successful
online retailers, bringing in a substantial portion of QVC's $4.4
billion of sales yearly.
Thunderstone's Texis software plays an important role at QVC
in a variety of ways.
Unlike television sales, where each item is on sale for only a
few minutes at a time, QVC's entire inventory is available all
the time on its web site. The online database thus has hundreds
of thousands of products, and requires a robust search engine to
help users find the items that satisfy them.
QVC needed its search engine to do more than simply search,
however. The company had many advanced requirements.
For example, its customers are price sensitive, so QVC wanted
to enable them to select by price as well as by description. A
user can enter "gold necklace" and "$100",
and QVC's Texis system automatically finds products within +/-
25% of the user-entered price. QVC found Texis the best product
for combining a numeric range query with a text search.
Texis's real-time functionality also is crucial to QVC.
We update our inventory in realtime to make sure sold-out
products are not offered to the customer.
This is
especially important In high volume periods like 'Fashion
Day' where certain colors and sizes sell out quickly and
frequently. This is a key function Texis provides that no other
search engine we've seen can do.
Frendy Glasser, QVC Director of Data Administration
In addition to serving search results, Texis powers the
"drill-down" or catalog browsing features, which are
based on product metadata. And when a user views the detailed
description associated with an individual item, Texis serves up
that content too.
Many other Texis features are in use. Products are ranked
according to QVC's proprietary criteria. And results are
retrieved from "partner" databases for products such as
books, music, and sporting goods.
The Texis applications are used as well by QVC's order-entry
representatives when customers call asking for a product. All in
all, the Texis installation at QVC is handling millions
of database queries daily. QVC runs Texis on IBM AIX hardware,
with the "front end" user interface written in ASP
running on Microsoft NT servers.
What's also important to us, besides the performance and
advanced features, is the flexibility to change how we respond to
queries as the business situation evolves.
We like knowing that Texis can be programmed to respond to
searches according to almost any logic we come up with. Before
Texis, we had another search package that was a major product in
the industry, but we were frustrated by programmability
limitations, and by its proprietary interface. Texis, in
additional to being a great search product, is easily
customizable due to its industry-standard database features.
We also value Texis's consistency in response time
regardless of volume, its scalability, and its
availability. We rarely, and I mean rarely,
have any downtime problems with the Thunderstone Texis
engine.
Frendy Glasser, QVC Director of Data Administration
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