About These Two Clients
Brasa.lt
Operating since 1997. Represents premium Italian furniture hardware brands in Lithuania - hinges, drawer systems, handles, soft-close mechanisms, sliding door systems, kitchen accessories. Core buyer: interior designers, cabinetmakers, and joiners who search by product code and specification.
AIC.lt
"Armijai ir civiliams" (For Army and Civilians). Serves military personnel, law enforcement, security professionals, hunters, and tactical gear enthusiasts. Demanding and knowledgeable buyer base with a specific and varied professional vocabulary.
Two completely different businesses. Both were running JoliSearch. Both independently switched to BRADsearch. The underlying reason was the same.
Brasa.lt: The Challenge
Complex catalogue with long, specific product names
A furniture hardware catalogue is not a general consumer product catalogue. A product name like "Soft-close drawer runner 550mm full extension NL push-to-open" has every element meaning something precise to the buyer. A search that returns anything shorter than an exact attribute match - or fails to rank the right specification first - is effectively useless for an interior designer or cabinetmaker on a deadline.
B2B buyers search by product code and specification
JoliSearch's relevance model is built for general consumer ecommerce. It improves the visual presentation of search results and adds autocomplete. It does not change the underlying relevance model for complex, specification-heavy B2B queries. Professional buyers searching by Hettich or Blum product codes, or by technical specifications, got results that reflected keyword proximity, not specification matching.
No analytics
There was no insight into what professional buyers were searching for, which product codes were being queried repeatedly, or where the catalogue was failing to satisfy demand. In a B2B catalogue with hundreds of specification variants, this is a significant operating blind spot.
AIC.lt: The Challenge
Slow, unclear search for professional buyers
JoliSearch's general-purpose relevance model wasn't adapted for tactical gear terminology. Professional buyers couldn't find products they knew were in the catalogue - products they'd bought before, or products they were looking for by a specific military designation or civilian name.
No insight into professional buyer terminology
Tactical gear has a unique vocabulary problem. The same product may be referred to by its military designation, its civilian brand name, its manufacturer's product name, or abbreviations and shorthand used by different professional communities. Without analytics, there was no way to understand which terminology variants customers were using - and therefore no way to configure synonym matching accurately.
Brasa.lt: The Solution
Specification-level query resolution
Partial product code entry resolves to the correct product and its variants. Multi-attribute queries like "soft-close 550mm push-to-open NL" are processed as structured queries, with each element acting as a filter against the indexed specification data - not as a bag of keywords.
Tolerance and synonym handling
Typo tolerance for specification terminology handles the inevitable errors in complex product name entry. B2B buyers searching with approximate product codes or brand name variants still reach the correct product.
Analytics for catalogue intelligence
The analytics dashboard reveals which product specifications B2B clients are actively searching for but failing to find - surfacing both gaps in the current catalogue and opportunities for the sales team to follow up on demonstrated professional demand.
AIC.lt: The Solution
Analytics as the primary capability
Analytics were the most strategically valuable capability deployed first. The data revealed which terminology variants customers were actually using across different professional communities: "MOLLE pouch", "admin panel MOLLE", "tactical MOLLE attachment" - all looking for the same product category. This intelligence was the foundation for accurate synonym configuration, not a guess.
Smart matching and visual presentation
Visual product cards with smart multi-attribute matching replaced the flat text-based results. Typo tolerance for military abbreviations and shorthand ensures that professional buyers searching with the vocabulary of their field find the right product regardless of how they've entered the query.
The Outcomes
Brasa.lt
B2B buyers find specific furniture hardware by code and specification without navigating category trees or contacting sales. The search bar now functions as the primary product discovery tool for professional buyers who previously had to rely on a category browse or a phone call to find what they needed.
Analytics provide ongoing catalogue intelligence. Zero-result searches surface specific product specifications that are actively requested by B2B clients - a prioritised list of catalogue gaps, updated continuously, without any additional research effort.
AIC.lt
Professional buyers search using the vocabulary of their profession - abbreviations, brand shorthand, military designations - and get accurate results. Analytics revealed specific terminology patterns across different professional communities, enabling ongoing synonym configuration that improves with each data cycle.
The Pattern
JoliSearch improves the visual presentation of PrestaShop's native search. It doesn't change the underlying relevance model for complex B2B queries. Brasa.lt and AIC.lt both hit that ceiling - independently, in completely different markets. Their search requirements share a structure common across B2B and professional ecommerce: buyers search with specificity; precision queries demand a different relevance model; and analytics were the missing layer that turned search from a UX feature into an operational intelligence tool.