The pandemic caused massive shifts in the way we live, work and acquire the things we need. Lockdowns and social distancing protocols placed digital avenues at the forefront for carrying out our daily activities, from meeting with colleagues to shopping for groceries. The transformation to a digital-first world continues to happen at record speed, and eCommerce needs to keep pace. In the US alone, eCommerce penetration experienced 10 years of growth in just 3 months when the pandemic first hit. Alongside this growth, consumer expectations have been rising, and 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives.
ECOMMERCE PRODUCT DISCOVERY TECHNOLOGY IS A KEY BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR
Now, more than ever, companies need to be focused on transformation through technology. The goal is to deliver personalized shopping experiences that remove friction from the online shopping journey and get the right products in the hands of customers, faster. And it all starts with product discovery.
Product discovery technology should no longer be seen as a cost of doing business – it is the key differentiator that can enable individually personalized and relevant experiences that ultimately shape the way customers engage with your brand and boost revenues.
Providing quality product discovery through eCommerce search and recommendations is a challenge for retailers today, but it’s one that must be addressed. If it isn’t done well, customers will go elsewhere to find what they need. Gone are the days of brand loyalty. If shoppers can’t find what they need on your site, they will go to your competitors. After an unsuccessful search,76% of consumers abandon their sale, according to Google.
"In this Digital-first era, now, more than ever, retailers need to focus on transforming the customer experience through technology. Whether you are a B2B or B2C retailer, technology is your differentiator. In order to meet the demands of the digital-first era, Google and GroupBy are bringing the future of eCommerce to you by setting the standard for Product Discovery in the market. This partnership will emulate that tangible experience customers get from a brick and mortar store and bring it online to create a frictionless shopping experience that's bound to delight, while getting products to customers faster than ever before,” said Roland Gossage, CEO of GroupBy.
UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER INTENT IN AN OMNICHANNEL CONTEXT IS PARAMOUNT
Companies need to understand customer intent to provide the hyper-relevant results and recommendations that customers are now expecting. These results must draw upon data from instore and online, encompassing all customer interactions to provide a seamless, relevant and consistent search experience across web and mobile. Only then will retailers be able to create a truly distinctive and personalized omnichannel shopping experience – and reap the rewards in larger baskets and higher conversions. In fact, people are 40% more likely to spend more than planned when the shopping experience feels highly personalized, so the personalization of product discovery and recommendations are a must.
THE PRODUCT DISCOVERY PLATFORM powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail
While many companies rely on predictive analytics to create a certain level of personalization, GroupBy’s Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail uses true artificial intelligence (AI) technology. GroupBy’s partnership with Google means retailers can implement Google-quality search and recommendations based on Google’s semantic and contextual understanding of user intent, fortified by GroupBy’s expertise in leveraging online and instore data, data enrichment, merchandising, and business objectives to deliver an unmatched customer experience.
Google has spent years delivering personalized content across flagship properties such as Google Search, Google Shopping and YouTube. This has helped fuel state-of-the-art AI algorithms, now available within the highly scalable infrastructure of Google Cloud and GroupBy’s Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail. With GroupBy’s Product Discovery offerings, including Search, Navigation, Recommendations, Merchandising and Data Enrichment, all within a single platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail, retailers gain access to a one-stop-shop of best-in-class search technology. Want to learn more? Tune in to the panel discussion with Google and GroupBy as we cover more details about this partnership with industry analysts here.
WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
GroupBy’s Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail is a partnership that will help companies like yours deliver a personalized, frictionless product discovery and recommendations experience that will keep customers returning to your website.
The following is just a shortlist of the benefits your company can experience:
Increased customer engagement
Advanced machine
learning (ML) and artificial intelligence capabilities provide fast, accurate and high-quality search
results and recommendations that help increase customer engagement and shorten the shopping journey. This
ultimately reduces bounce rates and improves customer retention.
Higher conversions and revenue
Drive
conversions through more personalized shopping experiences and increase basket size with highly relevant
cross-selling opportunities, all powered by AI. Overcome cold-start challenges where no customer or product
data exists, by leveraging Google’s AI engine and GroupBy’s data enrichment capabilities.
Scalable search
capabilities
Enterprise-size companies have a lot of data. With this platform there
are no limits to putting your data to work for you. Deliver personalized search results and product
recommendations, leveraging both your online and instore data, on a platform that scales with your
business.
A deeper understanding of customer intent
Gain
access to best-in-class technology that draws on Google’s semantic understanding of customer intent
and context to provide the highest quality search results and most relevant recommendations.
Improve retention
Reduce bounce rates and
increase customer engagement and ultimately build a loyal customer base with more personalized shopping
experiences, tailored cross-selling opportunities, unmatched search and recommendations results, and
enriched product data.
Reduce manual intervention
Reduce manual
intervention posed by rule-based systems and huge catalogs with the implementation of a modern ML engine
that leverages natural language processing (NLP), advance query understanding and ranking models.
Google-quality search that is also
customizable
Benefit from Google’s advanced search capabilities that are also
configurable to meet your business needs, including overriding search and recommendations to highlight
products you want to move.
A single platform for all product discovery
needs
Optimize search and recommendations results, improve product placement and analyze key
results to implement specific pricing, inventory and promotional optimization strategies that update in near
real time and align with business objectives.
WHY GOOGLE AND GROUPBY ARE BETTER TOGETHER
Gain a 360-degree customer view, surface unbeatable search results and create highly relevant recommendations with the Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail. GroupBy’s team will partner with you throughout the process, from onboarding through ongoing optimization, and help you to:
1. Understand your customers
Understanding how your shoppers interact with your digital platform is the first step to providing a rich, fulfilling experience that is relevant to each individual user. With a complete, holistic view of customer shopping behavior, you can unlock unbeatable search results and recommendations. The Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail and GroupBy’s team will help you to:
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Identify shopper habits and understand their intent across all channels of your eCommerce platform.
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Connect customer in-store shopping habits to their online profile to personalize their digital shopping experience.
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Learn from user behavior to deliver relevant results based on historical actions.
GroupBy’s in-house team of eCommerce experts will help you analyze trends and patterns to optimize your omnichannel strategy, drawing upon years of experience delivering tailored solutions to high-performing brands.
2. Transform your data
Successful purchases are based on the details and your product catalog is the backbone of your eCommerce platform. We pull data from both your instore and online sources, then implement our three-step Identify-Classify-Enrich process:
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Identify the most important attributes for your shoppers, using our proprietary data enrichment and custom ML models.
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Classify and product-type your catalog, and then add the useful contextual product attributes from our own library.
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Enrich your product records by adding these new attributes or cleaning existing data points.
The result is robust, normalized and standardized data that resonates with your customers, improves product discovery and ensures that search results are dependable.
3. Unleash the power of AI
Draw upon Google’s advanced query understanding and ranking across their flagship properties. All of your data can now be put to work to personalize search and recommendations for your customers. Our partnership with Google enables you to leverage powerful machine learning algorithms to:
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Understand omnichannel context and optimize for user intent.
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Overcome cold-start challenges where no customer or product data exists, by leveraging Google Cloud which draws upon recommendations and search expertise used by billions of people across the world.
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Benefit from responsive models that are updated daily to handle changes in catalog, user behavior or trends.
GroupBy optimizes Google’s ML models to provide outputs that are tailored for each business use case or goal – no need to hire your own data science team.
4. Curate your experience
GroupBy enables your merchandisers to take control of the whole customer experience, using Command Center, a scalable, easy-to-use platform that empowers them to:
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Manage and override search and recommendations to drive specific outcomes.
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Highlight items to bring directly to the customer’s fingertips.
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Validate hypotheses by setting up A/B tests and comparing different experiences.
With Command Center, your team can build targeted campaigns for your customers and optimize results for your key business objectives.
SUMMARY
The pandemic accelerated eCommerce growth, with 60% of interactions taking place online in 2020 versus 42% in 2019. Customer expectations have also been rising, which is putting added pressure on companies to improve their digital experience. While legacy systems and constrained resources can hinder a company’s ability to modernize, now is not the time to take a wait and see approach.
At GroupBy, we power eCommerce search and recommendation experiences for some of the world’s largest retail customers, truly impacting their key business metrics. This new platform, made possible by a strategic partnership between GroupBy and Google, is revolutionizing the eCommerce experience and breaking new ground in product discovery technology.
GroupBy’s expertise in search, recommendations, data enrichment and merchandising, combined with Google’s AI engine and years of experience understanding customer intent, will take your user engagement to higher levels and drive more conversions. By implementing GroupBy’s Product Discovery Platform powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail, your company will be providing state-of-the-art search and recommendation results that will delight customers and deliver higher revenue gains.
Ready to learn more? Request a demo with one of our experts.