Shopify Inc.and Google Cloud have today announced a new integration that enables retailers using Commerce Components—Shopify’s enterprise retail solution—to leverage Google-quality search capabilities and AI innovations.
Enterprise brands on Shopify can today access Google Cloud’s Discovery Al solutions directly through Commerce Components, Shopify’s modern, composable stack for enterprise retail. This integration, which can now be used by Shopify merchants globally and is available in most languages, increases access to Google’s advanced search and browsing technologies so that retailers can create more fluid and fruitful shopping experiences for their customers.
Shopify and Google Cloud’s new integration equips enterprise brands with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven product discovery capabilities that address real-world business challenges, including:
- Google Cloud Retail Search, which provides advanced query understanding that can produce better results from even broad queries, including non-product and semantic searches, to effectively match product attributes with website content for fast, relevant product discovery.
- An AI-powered browse feature that uses machine learning to select the optimal ordering of products on a retailer’s eCommerce site once shoppers choose a category, like “women’s jackets” or “kitchenware.” Over time, the AI learns the preferred product ordering for each page on an eCommerce site using historical data, optimising how and what products are shown for accuracy, relevance, and likelihood of making a sale.
- An AI-driven personalisation capability that customises the results customers get when they search and browse retailers’ websites. The AI underpinning the personalisation capability uses a customer’s behaviour on an eCommerce site, such as their clicks, cart, purchases, and other information, to determine shopper taste and preferences.
- A Google Cloud Recommendations AI solution that helps retailers deliver personalized recommendations at scale. Recent upgrades to Recommendations AI can make a retailer’s eCommerce properties even more personalised, dynamic and helpful for individual customers.
- Advanced security and privacy practices that help ensure retailer data is isolated with strong access controls and is only used to deliver relevant search results on their own properties.
“We’re thrilled to continue our long-standing partnership with Google Cloud,” said Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify. “We’re bringing together the best in commerce with the best in search to solve a complex and costly problem for enterprise retailers—world-class search and discovery for the online store.”
“Shopify integrating Google Cloud’s Discovery AI technology into its enterprise retail solution puts the power of AI directly into the hands of merchants and brands to solve everyday problems,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Now, retailers will be able to enhance their digital properties with better product discovery experiences, creating more fulfilling shopping experiences for their customers.”
Despite the continued rise in online shopping, many shoppers report hurdles in the product discovery experience on retailers’ eCommerce properties. New research from a Google Cloud-commissioned Harris Poll survey found that search abandonment—when a shopper searches for a product on a retailer’s website or mobile app but doesn’t find what they are looking for—costs retailers more than US$2 trillion annually globally, and more than US$234 billion in the U.S. alone.
Shoppers themselves say they depend on the search function or search box when shopping; it’s the most common way U.S. consumers search for products on retail websites (69 per cent), followed closely by general website browsing (63 per cent). The problem is that retailers’ search experiences lack consistency, as only one in 10 U.S. shoppers say they get exact results for their queries (12 per cent) or good alternatives (11 per cent) every time they use the search function on a retailer’s site. In fact, more than three in four U.S. consumers (76 per cent) say that in the past month, they have used the search function or search box on a retail website and it did not provide the item they were looking for.
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