Retail Search: Google’s Newest Feature for eCommerce Stores to Win Big

How many times have you searched for a product on an eCommerce website only to get irrelevant, or worse, no research at all? While the majority of eCommerce websites have a strong search engine, some fail to provide a user-friendly customer experience to the visitors. 

A 2021 Research suggests that 94% of the U.S shoppers abandon their shopping because of the irrelevant search results; the phenomenon is called “search abandonment.” A poor discovery of products is a sure-shot way to drive-away visitors from your online store. 

With the release today of our newest discovery solution, Retail Search, now broadly accessible, merchants globally can supercharge their websites and mobile applications with Google-quality search. Built on Google’s technologies that comprehend user intent and context, the solution helps companies enhance the search and overall purchasing experience across all of their digital touchpoints.

Already, early adopters including Lowes, Fnac Darty, and Casas Pernambucanas have been leveraging Google Cloud’s discovery solutions to enhance sales conversions, raise basket sizes, and improve customer engagement.

It’s hard to figure out user intent in search

Shoppers still have trouble finding what they’re searching for, despite Google’s advances since the days of keyword searches and boolean logic. If they discover anything relevant at all, they may have to rephrase their question many times in order to obtain the exact results they want, and this may take a lot of time and effort.

When a single eCommerce site offers tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand, different products, traditional search methods are no longer effective.

Today, customers want search engines to grasp their purpose more thoroughly, offer relevant results quicker, and help them find new goods with tailored suggestions.

Customers may now benefit from enhanced, contextual product discovery on retail sites thanks to new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-based search engines that combine marketing insights with data science.

If you search for a “long black dress with short sleeves and comfortable fit” on an eCommerce site, you should instantly get results for just that—rather than having to refine your search many times, or worse, abandoning your purchasing adventure.

Solving the search experience problems of retailers 

By providing results that are intuitive and contextual, Retail Search enhances the shopping experience and makes it simpler for customers to locate the goods they are looking for.

Using this fully managed solution, enterprises can design shopper-focused search experiences. On our site, we use Google’s years of knowledge and innovation in the indexing, retrieval, and ranking of search results. Using enhanced capabilities, retailers may make product discovery even simpler for customers, while also maximizing their business objectives, such as

Improved search results from even the widest queries, including non-product searches, thanks to improved query interpretation.

Finding the right products quickly and efficiently may be accomplished via the use of semantic search.

Get particular corporate objectives by using user engagement and ranking algorithms to achieve optimal outcomes.

Secure, private, and cutting-edge procedures that guarantee retailer data is kept separate with strict access restrictions and are only used to give appropriate search results on their own sites.

With the help of Google Cloud, retailers can turn product discovery into a fast, relevant, and customized experience for their customers.

Immediate impact for early adopters

Using Google Cloud’s product discovery tools, major retailers across the globe have been able to rapidly improve their consumers’ online shopping experiences and capture more digital and omnichannel growth.

“With minimal consumer signals and no past data, descriptive long-tail inquiries are some of the most difficult questions to comprehend,” said Neelima Sharma, senior vice president, technology, eCommerce, marketing, and merchandising at Lowe’s. “Since we launched, we’ve witnessed an increase in click-through and search conversion, as well as a decrease in our ‘No Results Found’ rate, thanks to our partnership with Google Cloud.”

Our goal at Fnac Darty has always been to provide our consumers with an easier, more personalized, and better online shopping experience, which is why we are always working to improve our website’s search engines. Increasing conversion rates and improving customer happiness are two goals of the solution we want to adopt on our Fnac Darty websites since we are the first French retailer to do so.

Fabiano Rustice, chief information officer of Pernambucanas, says that Google Cloud has improved the indexing and quality of search results on Pernambucanas’ digital platforms, giving a better customer experience and increasing sales conversions. On Black Friday in November 2021, the busiest shopping day in Brazil, we noticed a 20% drop in search refinements per user thanks to Retail Search. Having Google Cloud as a key innovation partner is a great honor for us.”

To complement the work done by Google Cloud, our network of major partners such as GroupBy and Lucidworks and GridDynamics and SpringML are using Google Cloud discovery solutions to create value-added services for their clients as well.

According to Roland Gossage, CEO of GroupBy, merchants are emphasizing product discovery in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive online industry. Our product discovery solutions have been launched in many client scenarios with the help of our partnership with Google Cloud,” says GroupBy. Online revenues are already up by more than 10%, amounting to millions of dollars, and this is only the beginning.

A professional eCommerce website development agency will understand the importance of retail search and will be able to develop eStores that understand user intent. 

If you’re interested in eStore development, feel free to get in touch with our experts.