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I took it off because it's worthless and frustrating. It looks deceptively simple and easy to use, so people tend to click on one of the browse letters instead of using the search function - but when you have 12,000 stores to sift through, search is more effective than browsing. Click on a letter like "C", and spend the next 15 minutes of your life sifting through 50 pages of stores beginning with the letter C (but you won't see stores like My Computer Store or 1 Computers, in that list). I'd rather people use the search, which does work decently well, rather than get frustrated with our browse function and leave the site.
We use some pretty sophisticated analytics from a company called Omniture to measure the impact that the browse function has on our site. Removing it had a positive impact on the percentage of people that were able to find the store reviews page that they were looking for as well as decreased the number of people that exited ResellerRatings from an intermediary page like the store search/browse.
Expect to see an improved browse feature as well as an improved search feature within the next week or so.
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