New Features of This Buyer's Guide
Structured Purchasing Process
Buying photonics products usually means spending substantial amounts of money, which implies responsibility. We warmly recommend using a structured purchasing process: to make sure that you consider all relevant aspects, and to properly document how you got to your decision.
We now actively support such a structured approach on all the pages with suppliers for our 760 product categories. For example, see the page for buying laser diodes. The key points are:
- Learn enough about the technology, as this key for understanding the requirements. We offer comprehensive high-quality learning resources for that – for free!
- Define your requirements. You need to work out a list of specifications. We support this by giving you a list of important aspects to consider – specifically for each of the 760 product categories!
- Find suppliers. You can select suppliers from our huge database, and our tool helps you to systematically check them against all your specifications.
Further improvements of this tool are expected to be finished soon.
AI-based Product Search
When searching suppliers for some items in our Buyer's Guide, the first step is usually to identify a suitable product category in order to get the list of suppliers for that.
It is not always obvious which category to choose, but with our new AI-based semantic search feature, we now make it substantially easier for you. In addition, you get search results based on product descriptions of our advertisers.
To use this feature, simply click on the search field “Product keyword”, e.g. on the Start page of the Buyer's Guide.
By the way, we also offer a great semantic full-text search feature in the Encyclopedia.
AI Assistant for Product Descriptions
The key feature of our advertising package is to publish product descriptions, which then appear at various locations:
- in the lists of suppliers for the chosen product categories
- on the supplier's profile page
- and even in related encyclopedia articles
The description texts should be optimized for usability, which implies good language, clear statements, appropriate length, and various other aspects. Here, our new AI-based assistant can help a lot. It has been instructed to consider all the advice which we give to our clients. We have integrated that assistant very conveniently into the forms (e.g. the registration form for new suppliers): You can see the modified description, compare it with your original one, and edit it further.