A new book search at Alibris
One of the unique things about Alibris is that we want every book out there at your fingertips: new books, used books, rare and out-of-print books, signed books, and so on. That universe is over 100 M books from over 10,000 sellers!
A normal bookseller has, at most, just a few copies of The Hobbit. We have almost all of them. Now, how do you balance all those copies with all the different types of book lovers who want them? We needed a more powerful, easier-to-use book search.
After doing a lot of research on our users and getting their feedback, it didn’t seem like our old version helped you do that as much as we would like. So, we sat down and thought about how we could use some of the newer web technologies out there to make it easier to find the exact copy that you’re looking for. But rather than talk about it, maybe it’s just easier to show you:
We hope you’ll like the new book search. Going forward, we’ll be making a lot more changes to the site to give you the control to find the unique book you’re looking for.
One of the realities of making that big of a change to our site is that we know there are going to be people who liked the older version better because that’s always what happens when you make a big change. We’ve put a lot of thought into this new search, and we’ve received a lot of feedback from the first users to get it. It does seem like a lot more people do like it than don’t. So, give it a shot. But if you don’t like it or have ideas on how to make it better, please, please, please give us some feedback below on how we can make it better!
Note: Ok. Two caveats. 1) Our UK site will deploy this later. And the most important one…2) Our new search flow isn’t optimized for Internet Explorer 6 which is almost 9 years old now and only makes up 6% of our customer base (see our IE 6 blog post). So, for IE 6 users, we’ll automatically give you the older book search.
But you can upgrade to a faster, safer, and more powerful browser for FREE here:
Don't you deserve a free browser made in this decade?
Themocracy
I’m sure the new search features will be more helpful to those users who do not know exactly what they want when they come here, but I often already know the edition I want, and just want to see all the book details for the books available, so I can choose the one I want.
Your format does not help the more-knowledgeable reader who wants books here. Old format would allow you to call up all editions and see all the book details. New format only lets you see the first line of the description and that’s just not as helpful to help you choose the one book you want to order. (clicking on each individual Show Details button is very inconvenient).
My suggestions for possible solutions are to offer an option to allow you to view details for all books displayed on page, or to show more of the Book Details in the display that pops up.
Hi Robin, thanks for the feedback! A few others have also mentioned hiding less of the inventory descriptions. Let me talk to our web people and see what we can do.
Just so we know what’s working for you and what isn’t, is there anything about the new search process that you like?