94% US consumers abandon shopping session due to irrelevant results

Retailers miss out on a staggering $300 billion each year due to search abandonment in the US alone. But, with latest discovery solution, Retail Search, now generally available, retailers worldwide can supercharge their websites and mobile apps with Google-quality search. Built on Google’s technologies that understand user intent and context, the solution helps businesses improve the search and overall shopping experience across all of their digital touchpoints.

Already, early adopters like Lowes, Fnac Darty, and Casas Pernambucanas have been using Google Cloud’s discovery solutions to increase sales conversions, boost basket sizes, and improve customer engagement, as per the report.

Fortunately, product discovery experiences on retail sites can now offer superior, contextual experiences for consumers, combining marketing and data science insights along with advanced search technologies based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

Now, through the power of Retail Search, when a shopper searches for a “long black dress with short sleeves and comfortable fit” on an ecommerce site, they should immediately get results for precisely that—rather than refining their search multiple times, or worse, giving up their shopping journey. Retail Search transforms the shopping experience and makes it easier for shoppers to find relevant products by surfacing results that are intuitive and contextual. 

“With limited customer signals and no historical data, descriptive long-tail searches are some of the most challenging queries to understand,” said Neelima Sharma, senior vice president, technology, e-commerce, marketing and merchandising at Lowe’s. “We have been partnering with Google Cloud to give our customers relevant results for long-tail searches and have seen an increase in click-through and search conversion and a drop in our ‘No Results Found’ rate since we launched.”

"Making constant improvements to our website search engines has always been a priority for us as we aim to give our customers a simpler, more customised and enhanced online shopping experience,” said Olivier Theulle, Fnac Darty's chief ecommerce and digital officer. “As we implement Google Cloud’s site search solution on our Fnac Darty websites and are the first French retailer to do so, we expect the solution to deliver increased conversion rates while also offering greater customer satisfaction.

This fully managed service is easily customisable, enabling organisations to craft shopper-focused search experiences. Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimising for their business goals with advanced capabilities.

“Google Cloud has helped improve the indexing and quality of search results on Pernambucanas’ digital platforms, providing a better experience to our customers and improving sales conversions,” said Fabiano Rustice, chief information officer at Pernambucanas. “On Black Friday in November 2021—the largest retail date in Brazil—we saw a 20% reduction in search refinements per user, for which Retail Search was instrumental. We are proud to be an early adopter and to have Google Cloud as a strategic innovation partner.”

In addition to Google Cloud’s efforts working directly with customers, the ecosystem of key partners, including GroupBy, Lucidworks, GridDynamics, SpringML, and others are also leveraging Google Cloud discovery solutions to provide value added services to their customers. 

“In the fast paced and extremely competitive e-commerce environment, we are seeing that forward-looking and innovative retailers are prioritizing product discovery,” said Roland Gossage, CEO of GroupBy. “GroupBy has proudly partnered with Google Cloud to launch its product discovery solutions across several client environments. Already we have seen a more than 10 per cent increase in online revenues, which equates to millions of dollars, and this is just the beginning.”

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)