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Off the Shelf Products Are Now Easier to Find

Colin Burton on October 26, 2011

We’ve been working hard to ensure Scientist can provide everything a scientist may need throughout the course of their research, and make the experience of accessing it all as easy as possible. Our latest addition to the platform introduces new standalone product subcategories and a robust faceted browsing feature to help the user narrow down their search results quickly and efficiently.

For those unfamiliar with the term faceted browsing, it is probably something you are exposed to on the internet all the time without even realising it. Popular consumer websites, such as Amazon.com and Newegg.com, implement this method to aid users in finding the right products as well. Scientist employs faceted browsing by categorising products with defined lists, which are available to the left of the search result list.

As an example of how this works in the real world, imagine we want to search for a mouse VEGF protein for use as a control in an ELISA we are developing. First we would navigate to the Protein Products subcategory, but when we get there we see that the list is far to long to successfully scroll through and find the right product. A quick way to eliminate a large portion of the search results would be to choose the desired protein type, so in the Protein Type facet (to the left of the search results) we will click Growth Factors. We can now choose the desired species or origin for the protein we want, so in this case we’ll go to the Species facet and select Mouse. We are now left with a very manageable results list, and can easily find our desired Mouse VEGF protein.

We have created seven new product-based subcategories so far. A special thanks goes out to the San Diego based vendor, Reagent Proteins, for for helping us define the initial facets in the Antibody Products and Protein Products subcategories.

Here is a list of all of the new product subcategories:
* Antibody Products
* Protein Products
* Cell Products
* DNA Products
* RNA Products
* Cell Based Assay Kits
* Drug Target Assay Kits

If you are a product supplier looking to expand the global reach of your proprietary products or simply looking to compete in the provision of experimental reagents and kits, we’d be happy to provide you with more information in the opportunity to upload your product catalog into our marketplace. Please contact us.