Biotech & life sciences
Search that understands chemistry, not just keywords
A researcher looking for a reagent is not running a text query. They are filtering by molecular weight, reactivity and application — and generic e-commerce search has no idea what any of that means.
What the work is up against
01
Catalogues at a scale text search cannot handle
Hundreds of thousands of complex biological products make discovery the bottleneck. Legacy search fails on the specific chemical queries that matter.
02
Procurement is global and inventory is live
A product that is in stock in one region and not another has to be represented honestly, in real time, or the cart is a fiction.
03
The buyer is a scientist, not a shopper
Faceting has to mirror how the domain actually classifies things, or researchers abandon the platform for a supplier catalogue PDF.
What we build for biotech teams
High-performance faceted search
Search infrastructure that stays responsive across catalogues of hundreds of thousands of complex products, where generic text indexing collapses.
Domain-accurate filtering
Facets that mirror how the field actually classifies material — molecular weight, reactivity, application — rather than retail attributes borrowed from consumer commerce.
Real-time global inventory logic
Availability represented honestly per region, so a cart reflects what can actually ship rather than what exists somewhere in the network.
Procurement-shaped commerce flows
Quotes, institutional accounts and approval steps, because a lab does not buy the way a consumer does.
Relevance tuned on real query logs
Ranking validated against what researchers actually search for, which rarely resembles what a marketing team expects them to search for.
How we approach it
The buyer is a scientist
A researcher arrives knowing the properties of what they need and not its product name. Search that expects a keyword fails immediately. Building SCBT’s platform meant treating the facet taxonomy as the primary interface and the text box as secondary.
Catalogue scale changes the architecture
At 200,000+ products, discovery is the bottleneck rather than checkout. Investment went into indexing and query performance, which is where the 35% improvement in search-to-cart conversion came from — not from redesigning the basket.
Inventory honesty over inventory optimism
Showing stock that cannot ship to a given region converts once and then loses the account. Real-time regional inventory was treated as a correctness requirement rather than an enhancement.
Delivered work
SCBT — United States
A faceted chemical search and B2B scientific procurement platform replacing legacy search across a very large catalogue.
- Products indexed
- 200k+Products indexed
- Labs served worldwide
- 5,000+Labs served worldwide
- Lift in search-to-cart conversion
- 35%Lift in search-to-cart conversion
Questions we get from biotech teams
- Why does standard e-commerce search fail for scientific catalogues?
- Because a researcher is not running a text query. They arrive knowing molecular weight, reactivity and application, and not the product name. Search built around a keyword box fails immediately at that scale; the facet taxonomy has to be the primary interface.
- How large a catalogue can this handle?
- The SCBT platform indexes over 200,000 complex biological products with responsive query performance. At that scale discovery, not checkout, is the bottleneck, so the investment goes into indexing and query latency rather than into basket flow.
- Can you represent regional stock accurately?
- Yes, and it should be treated as a correctness requirement rather than a feature. Showing availability that cannot ship to the buyer’s region converts once and then loses the account. Real-time inventory logic runs per distribution region.
- How do you validate that search is actually working?
- Against real researcher query logs, which rarely resemble what a marketing team expects. Relevance tuned on actual queries is where the 35% improvement in search-to-cart conversion came from.