Suppose a customer is looking for a Teen Study Bible in the New International Version with the words of Jesus in red. Currently, the best a user can do at most online bookstores is to restrict product results to a single translation (e.g., the NIV), leaving her to dig through dozens, if not hundreds, of results to find one that meets her other criteria.
We are targeting this niche market by creating an easy-to-use shopping search that enables customers to drilldown to exactly the product they desire. In addition to being able to restrict results by translation, bstore empowers users to be able to restrict results based on many criteria, including type of Bible (e.g., study Bible, devotional Bible, pew Bible), features (e.g., red-letter, large print), binding (e.g., leather, hardcover, paperback), and target audience (e.g., teenagers, men, women).
Here is a preview of bstore in action. Note that the user is viewing Study Bibles in the New International Version that have a dictionary and a targeted toward adults.
In addition to restricting search by criteria, a user can search by a products title, as shown below.
Furthermore, users may sort matching results by one of five fields.
Finally, if a user is interested in a particular product, she may view more information about it by clicking that product's "More info" link, as shown in the example below.
The following online bookstores offer some sort of Bible-specific store:
Of the above, ChristianBook.com's Bible store offers the greatest "drilldown" capabilities. Unfortunately, that site's effectiveness is greatly weakened by its slow load time.
The most similar store to the one we are creating is an affiliate website called The Bible Finder. That site looks like it hasn't been updated in many years because a significant number of the Bibles listed are now out of print and many recently-published Bibles are not even included on the site. Most importantly, the site is very cumbersome to use because every click made by the user causes a full page-reload. This greatly detracts from the user's experience.
Our server back-end supports two basic types of queries: