The highly competitive eCommerce landscape is constantly evolving to meet the ever-increasing expectations of today’s modern consumers. Shoppers seek seamless and personalized online experiences where they can easily find the products they're looking for, regardless of how they search for them. To meet these demands, retailers must invest in a robust search and product discovery platform.
GroupBy, recently named a Challenger in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery, is revolutionizing the industry with its innovative approach. Our all-in-one solution empowers retailers to bridge the gap between consumer and merchant, delivering exceptional digital experiences that increase sales, site-wide metrics, and the digital customer experience.
In a competitive market saturated with search providers, GroupBy equips retailers with five key differentiators that deliver tangible results:
1. Leveraging the Power of Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for Commerce:
Unlike legacy search solutions, GroupBy leverages the latest advancements in AI. Our AI-first platform is the only one currently on the market that is fully powered by Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for Commerce. Built for eCommerce use cases, this next-generation search engine can deliver highly relevant search results every time, even for ambiguous, conversational, and long-tail queries.
The AI/ML models that make up the Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Commerce engine and that power the GroupBy platform are trained on 1.8 trillion events collected from Google’s flagship properties such as Google.com, YouTube and Google Shopping, Google’s AI is continuously updated, registering 85 billion new events daily. This enables our product discovery technology to understand natural language and ambiguous searches, returning accurate results that go beyond relevance. Google’s enhanced understanding ensures customer search queries deliver exceptional results based on user intent and context. This allows retailers to mimic the power of a Google search within an online store providing shoppers with results that are relevant, buyable, and personalized while being optimized for business revenue.
2. Rule-Free Merchandising for Boosted Productivity:
GroupBy eliminates the need for manual rule creation, a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that plagues traditional search solutions.
Historically, merchandising strategies were implemented to support campaigns. However, as technology advanced, the role of merchandisers expanded to curating and managing rules designed to optimize the eCommerce search experience. Today, many retailers have thousands of rules to manage, which is very time-consuming and cumbersome for merchandising teams.
An AI-first search and product discovery platform eliminates the need for manual rule curation. Going from thousands of rules to rule-free frees up your merchandising team to focus on strategic initiatives and high-impact activities, such as building and launching new campaigns, exploring innovative technologies and negotiating lucrative brand deals.
Imagine a 60% boost in productivity – that's the kind of efficiency increase GroupBy has delivered for our clients. Now, your team can focus on the high-impact, strategic business activities that only humans can do.
3. B2B Functionality Built for Success:
B2B eCommerce search presents unique challenges with complex queries involving part numbers, highly technical terms, and multiple numeric entries like make and model. Our platform excels in complex B2B use cases, including customer-specific availability and pricing, large product catalogs, automatic unit conversion, part number search, complex query understanding, and year, make and model fitment search.
These capabilities are becoming especially critical for B2B wholesalers, distributors and retailers as recent studies have shown that practically all B2B buyers have expressed a desire for self-service capabilities for part or all of the buying journey. GroupBy’s robust set of B2B features ensures that B2B customers can find what they need quickly and easily, driving sales and improving key website metrics.
4. Internationalization Capabilities for Global Reach:
GroupBy caters to a global audience. GroupBy's platform offers robust internationalization capabilities, seamlessly handling multilingual content and natively supporting search in 72 languages. Tapping into Google’s translation abilities, our platform can even deliver relevant search results for queries in a language other than a website’s default language. For example, if a customer searches a Spanish website in English, our platform can return relevant results in Spanish. This empowers brands to deliver a consistent and positive search experience for customers worldwide.
5. Enrich: Solving Product Data Issues at the Root:
Poor quality product data is a major hurdle for effective search as it can lead to mediocre navigation, filtering and comparisons, ultimately hindering product selection. For example, product color attribution is essential. As humans, we understand that navy is a shade of blue, but with legacy keyword search, items cataloged as navy won’t show up in a search for blue because that does not match the product entry.
On the B2B side, attribution is critical regarding factors such as unit conversion. For instance, a manufacturer might only provide metric measurements with their product descriptions, but a distributor with an American client base will require imperial measurements to ensure product findability. To ensure a product shows up across all channels and queries, it’s important to include both units of measurement within the product data so it will appear in the search results regardless of the measurement the customer is searching for.
GroupBy's Enrich product eliminates this challenge by enriching, correcting, and normalizing product data. Enrich ensures product attributes align with shopper search intent, leading to a more intuitive search experience, improved product findability, and increased metrics like average order value (AOV).
Being named a Challenger in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery is a significant achievement. The Gartner report highlights GroupBy's strengths, including its industry coverage, B2B use case capabilities and leverage of Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for Commerce.
Here are some key takeaways from the Gartner report that solidify GroupBy's position as a leader:
- AI-first Search Optimization: The report emphasizes GroupBy's superior technology insights, sharing, "The core search algorithm (Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Commerce) uses Google Shopping data and query trends to drive many relevance, personalization and product recommendation strategies automatically."1 Where legacy technology can only sort products for query relevance, this next-generation search technology adds additional calculations for buyability and personalization, delivering a set of search results that are likely to be purchased and that align with each customer’s individual preferences. These unparalleled search optimization capabilities are possible due to the 1.8 trillion events on which the search engine is trained on across Google’s flagship properties.
- Rule-Free Merchandising Advantage: Gartner recognizes GroupBy's strength in rule-free merchandising, stating, "AI-led optimization eliminates the need for search rules creation, significantly reducing manual merchandising."2 Our customers have gone from thousands of search rules to just a handful – or even none. This translates to a significant productivity boost for merchandisers, enabling them to focus on revenue-driving initiatives.
- B2B Capabilities Earn Recognition: The report acknowledges GroupBy's strong B2B functionality, highlighting "almost an even spread of B2C and B2B customers along with a broad set of B2B capabilities."3 This makes GroupBy a compelling choice for businesses operating in the B2B space, including wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors, their unique and complex search needs are met by our platform.
Beyond the recognition in the Gartner report, GroupBy demonstrates a continuous commitment to innovation. GroupBy’s ongoing investments in areas like Fitment AI (Year, Make, Model search), Conversational Commerce, and deep investigations into Generative AI for applications such as Data Enrichment, SEO and dynamic content creation for merchandisers, demonstrate our dedication to staying ahead of the curve and providing the most advanced search and product discovery solutions available.
The combination of Gartner’s recognition, proven strengths, and our commitment to innovation positions GroupBy as a trusted partner for retailers looking to optimize their digital experience.
In today's competitive eCommerce landscape, an AI-first superior search and product discovery platform is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. GroupBy's unique AI-first approach and leveraging of Google Cloud technology, empower retailers to bridge the gap between consumer and merchant. With increased merchandiser productivity, highly relevant search results, and a focus on internationalization, GroupBy equips you with the tools you need to win in the digital age.
Is your eCommerce platform delivering the seamless search experience your customers crave? Download The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to eCommerce Search and Product Discovery today to discover how our innovative platform can help you bridge the gap between merchant and consumer and unlock your full sales potential.
1, 2, 3 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery, Mike Lowndes, Aditya Vasudevan, Sandy Shen, Noam Dorros, 13 May 2024.
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