Google Introduces Retail Search for eCommerce Websites: What It Means for Retailers.
Google has introduced a new tool for eCommerce websites. In addition, Google Cloud made an available discovery tool named Retail Search.
Retail search can help buyers find more relevant search results. In addition, it offers google-quality search and suggestions on sellers’ online properties.
In the past decade, the global retail sector in the USA has struggled with the switch to online shopping.
This new tool is developed to give eCommerce stores the abilities of Google’s technology in their domains.
It is created using tried and tested Google’s search engine technologies that understand the searchers’ intent and context. It aims to help businesses and eCommerce agencies improve on-site search and user experience.
Shopping websites and online stores worldwide can turbocharge their sites and applications with google-quality search.
Even before the launch of retail search, Lowes, Casas Pernambucanas, and Fnac Darty were using google’s discovery technologies. These retail companies are the early adopters.
These solutions help them to increase basket sixes, boost sales conversions and enhance customer engagement.
Retail Search Joins Google’s Product Discovery Solutions
You would be interested in this news if you are an eCommerce agency. With a constant thirst for innovation, Google’s media teams keep assessing the retail industry. As the e-commerce sector is present in the digital landscape, they focus on the changes in the digital arena. They aim to help brands in the USA maximize results.
Google Cloud already has a suite of product discovery tools. One is vision product search which is based on machine learning. It can recognize and look up objects to give similar or related products from catalogs.
And the second is Recommendations AI. It provides suitable item suggestions to increase interaction across channels.
Ecommerce sites don’t only need a good eCommerce website design. They also need robust security and a guarantee of privacy. This full suite helps merchants to integrate information, handle models and oversee performance via a graphical interface.
Developed to be a full-fledged software suite, Google’s product discovery tools facilitate merchants with technologies based on artificial intelligence/ machine learning.
What is Search Abandonment?
We all have been there. We search for a product on an eCommerce website but find only irrelevant or sometimes no results. The search results say, “We are sorry. We can’t find any matches for your search term”.
We all know how annoying this phrase is when the site fails to understand what you want. The problem is that eCommerce website design and development are still improving. And they still lack high-quality search capabilities.
Online stores or shopping sites aim to make it easier for visitors to find what they want. But most of them don’t attain their objective.
Here are some statistics. Google Cloud and the Harris Poll surveyed in 2021. It shows that an early 94 percent of USA customers bounce back from a buying session due to irrelevant search results.
Experts call this phenomenon “search abandonment.” A bad product discovery experience makes the visitor annoyed. An e-commerce website can lose its buyers mid-conversion.
On the flip side, 69 percent of shoppers said they purchase extra goods after a happy search experience, according to the same study. In addition, successful search experiences increase sales, brand trust, and bigger orders.
In the USA, retailers lose a whopping 300 billion dollars yearly because of search abandonments. Retail Search expects to look after both aspects of the problem, decrease search abandonment, and boost purchases by enhancing buyer experiences.
Understanding the Searcher’s Intent is a Challenge
Many years ago, we used to search using keywords and boolean rules. Search technologies have become much more advanced now. But e-commerce buyers still have a hard time discovering what they need.
The eCommerce website search engine usually doesn’t understand until you perfectly word your query. You often have to repeat the search, again and again, using different versions of the same search query.
In short, conventional search engines have largely disappointed e-commerce buyers.
One e-commerce marketplace usually has tens of thousands of products. As a result, users want search engines to get their intent more meaningfully, provide relevant search results quicker, and help them find new goods easily with personalized suggestions.
Google is on a constant quest to give visitors better results. It keeps updating its search algorithms to understand better what a user is looking for and provide quicker results.
Retail Search uses this principle to enhance the buying experience.
Retail Search As A Pill For Search Experience Headaches
Retail Search is a fully managed service that can relieve you of all your product discovery woes. It pops up intuitive and contextual search results. Ecommerce agencies can easily customize it, allowing them to create buyer-focused discovery experiences.
Google is highly experienced in indexing, restoring, and visibility of search engine results. As a result, eCommerce website owners can use corporate principles to refine what consumers see, expand product display, filter by accessibility, and include tailored tags.
This enables them to propel desired results for interaction, profit, or conversions. Google has used this long experience and innovation to develop this tool. While using this search solution, you can link information with your current tools, such as Tag Manager, Google Analytics 360, Merchant Center, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage.
It features:
Advanced Query Understanding
Retail Search uses advanced AI to show better results from non-product searches and the broadest search queries.
Semantic Search
It performs a semantic search to find site content that matches product qualities efficiently. This enables quick and relevant product search.
Optimized Results
It gives optimized results that use visitor engagement and ranking versions to fulfill certain brand objectives.
Latest Privacy and Security Guidelines
Designers sometimes make a great eCommerce website design, but they can’t make the website secure. Retailers can rest assured that Google Cloud abides by modern privacy best practices.
You will have powerful access controls, and your data will stay isolated. The product discovery solution uses sellers’ information only to provide relevant results on their websites. Google Cloud favors compliance with GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation.
Thanks to this new search tool, eCommerce websites can transform product search into a timely, personalized, and relevant buying experience.
Early Adopters Noticing Fast Effect
Many top retail companies in and outside the USA are using Retail Search. It is not only helping them create better search discovery experiences for shoppers but also attain more online and omnichannel growth.
A high-ranking official in Lowe’s, Neelima Sharma, talked about the explanatory long-tail queries being the hardest to understand and said: that retailers have no historical information and restricted consumer signals to understand descriptive searches.
The partnership with Google Cloud has allowed us to offer relevant results to buyers for long-tail queries. As a result, we have seen a boost in click-through rate and search conversion and a decrease in our “No results matched your query” rate.
Ecommerce agencies should also use this tool as the industry giants are using it.
Fnac Darty’s e-commerce and digital officer Olivier Theulle shared similar thoughts. He said their company has always prioritized consistent enhancement of their site search engine.
Our objective is to deliver a more intuitive, highly customized, and improved digital buying experience. He further said that their company is the first French retail company to apply this solution to their sites.
They hope the tool will offer improved conversion rates and greater shopper satisfaction.
Fabiano Rustic is the chief information officer at a leading retail firm in Brazil named Pernambucanas. He said that their company had improved the search quality and indexing on their online platforms with the help of Google Cloud. In addition, its product discovery tool, Retail Search, furnishes a good experience to our consumers and increases sales conversions.
This statement shows that your visitors are attracted by good search abilities and not due to good e-commerce website design.
He further said that in 2021, Black Friday was the biggest retail date in their country. In addition, after they made a strategic innovation partnership with Google Cloud, their organization viewed a 20 percent decrease in search filtering per visitor.
He related the company’s success to Retail Search and said they are proud early adopters of this search solution.
Bottom Line
Every retail business in the USA is unique. They have different needs for product search solutions and specific buyer experience requirements. They want to achieve maximum revenue, quicker speed to market, and the best value from their product discovery software.
Running an online store requires product management skills and sophisticated payment methods. But the most important thing is to create a streamlined and easily manageable shopper journey.
Digital Gravity Agency can be your partner in achieving all the above-mentioned goals for your e-commerce business. Our dedicated and talented team uses state-of-the-art technologies and payment gateways that will keep your digital store round-the-clock active and highly secure.
We have comprehensive product discovery skills, better integration methods, and decades of experience.
