Today we added new functionality to our online marketplace: The ability to filter items by type. One problem our customers faced in finding the right products and comparing pricing on our online store was the inability to tell the difference between different item types.

For instance, we have five different types of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus:

  1. Select Agreement License (perpetual ownership)
  2. K12 Agreement (annual ownership for K12 schools)
  3. EES Agreement (annual ownership for K20 Schools)
  4. Shrinkwrap (perpetual ownership for individuals)
  5. Media (the disc needed to install licenses 1 to 3)

These items would all fall under the same category, and by and large have the same features, but definitely have varying prices.

Now when an OETC member is viewing a list of items either by category or by brand, she can filter the list by item type. This filter is in addition to the text filter and category filter already present on the store.

Today this filter capability is available for our Microsoft products. Next we’ll upgrade our Adobe database to add type-filter capabilities and then roll it out as appropriate to our other items.

If you haven’t tried our new store we encourage you do to so. Search is much more robust, allowing you search by a variety of terms including, OETC’s SKU, a manufacturer number, category or brand name, and of course terms in the item’s name. Additionally we’ve upgraded our database so that we can present information by category. Want to know all the projectors we have? Now you can view the projector category and see all projectors across brands.

We’ve also made it easier to for distributed purchasing departments to complete purchases, by allowing your institution members without purchasing authority to browse the catalog, create a cart of necessary items and forward that cart to an authorized purchaser.