I built one of our sites aspowersports.com a while ago when we were going to start selling Arctic Cat snowmobiles/ATV in addition to our BMW Motorcycle business (our BMW site is built on Storefront).

We've dropped the main line of business that I built the powersports site for, so it's been pretty much neglected and will most likely be just sitting there for our Vespa business.

Anyway, we are going to be picking up another line of motorcycles that requires it's own site, and since I liked using BV to build the other site, I'd like to use it again, however there are a few things that I'd like to see that I have not seen mentioned.

Does BV5 have, or can it be easily modified to provide, the following:

1) Powerful and robust product search engine?
I don't want to use categories/heirarchy to organize our merchandise. I prefer to have an ad-hoc method of product display that relies on keyword tagging. For instance instead of putting a helmet in the Helmet category, I prefer to load the product up with a bunch of tags (think keywords in wordpress or other blog) like kwHelmet, kwArai, kwRidingGear, and then create navigation links that lead to a customized search results page that operate on specfic keywords. This allows for a lot of flexibility in how inventory is organized.

Our BMW site does this. Here's an example for BMW F800S:
http://ascycles.com/Sear...px?&KeyWords=kwF800S~ kwAllBikes&Any=True
http://ascycles.com/SearchResul... kwAllBikes&Any=True

It would be REALLY powerful if the search engine allowed complex boolean search operators. So I could do:

kwHelmet AND kwGoggles NOT kwScorpion

These search term links can be dynamically built to provide merchandising opportunities, etc.

So does BV5 support a "real" search function, and if it does not out of the box, has anyone built a better one?


2) What kind of dynamic merchandising does BV5 offer out of the box, and what other options are available from a third party?
- Comprehensive "Customers Also Bought"
- Dynamic up-sell and cross-sell on product pages, add-to cart confirmations, shopping cart pages, checkout pages, etc.?
- etc.

I'm really looking for a lot of the "personalization" technologies that are available with the big boys like MarketLive that I see at Shop.org, InternetRetailer, and eTail shows. Are they there in BV yet?

3) Google analytics integration, especially goal conversion with data of the cart makeup and value (i.e. the ability to pass the parameters that GA requires to track e-commerce performance)

Feel free to email me directly if you don't want to post to the forum:

todd -at- ascycles.com


I'm also looking at hiring someone to build the site as well, so developers are welcome to chime in if they have a BV program with custom solutions to my above questions.