A new solution for e-commerce sites provides Google-quality search and recommendations for retailers’ digital properties.
Google Cloud announced the release of Retail Search, a tool designed to give retailers the functionality of the Google search engine on their own domains.
It’s built with Google technology that understands context and user intent to help businesses improve on-site search and the overall shopping experience.
Bad user experience costs online retailers
A Harris Poll and a survey conducted by Google Cloud found that poor online experiences cost U.S. retailers $300 billion each year, with 76 percent of consumers reporting unsuccessful searches causing them to abandon a purchase from a retail site.
Conversely, a good search experience has a clear correlation with higher purchase conversions, larger orders, and brand loyalty, with 69% of customers reporting additional purchases after a successful search experience.
Retail Search wants to address both sides of this problem, minimizing search abandonment and encouraging sales by improving the customer experience.
Intent and contextual keys to successful search
In its ongoing mission to provide users with better search results, Google’s search algorithms are continually updated to better understand user intent and return relevant results faster. Retail Search applies this principle to the shopping experience.
Google’s state-of-the-art artificial intelligence provides advanced query understanding for retail search, resulting in better product search results and recommendations even from broad queries.
Create a better customer experience
Fully managed and customizable retail search allows organizations to create shopper-centric search experiences. Based on search engine indexing, retrieval and ranking, it is designed to make product discovery easier for shoppers while optimizing retailers’ business goals.
Merchants can apply business rules to fine-tune what customers see, diversify product display, filter by availability, and add custom labels as they see fit. This enables them to drive the desired outcome of engagement, revenue or conversion.
Capabilities include:
- Advanced Query Understanding – A more accurate understanding of a searcher’s needs leads to better results.
- Semantic search – Effectively match product attributes to website content to create fast, relevant product discovery.
- Optimization Results – Results leverage user interaction and ranking models to meet specific business goals.
- Advanced Security and Privacy – Robust access controls protect retailer data and ensure it is only used to deliver relevant search results on its own properties.
Retail Search Joins Product Discovery Solutions Suite
Retail Search is the latest addition to Google Cloud’s product discovery solution, a set of tools designed to improve the efficiency of retail operations, simplify the digital shopping experience, and address changing consumer preferences.
It’s the result of Google’s internal media team’s ongoing analysis of the retail market and commitment to innovation as they seek to find new ways to help businesses maximize results in an ever-changing digital landscape.
It joins the current Google Cloud product Vision Product Search, which uses machine learning-driven object recognition and lookup to serve similar or complementary items in the product catalog, and Recommendations AI, which provides relevant product recommendations to drive engagement across channels.
The entire suite allows e-commerce owners to integrate data, manage models and monitor performance through a graphical interface. It integrates into existing tools including Google Analytics 360, Tag Manager and BigQuery.
Read about Google Cloud Retail Search Blog is here.
Featured Image: Rafapress/Shutterstock
