We all know about artificial intelligence (AI). But what many of us don’t know is that AI is now an essential component of e-Commerce, and specifically, site-search. AI impacts the site search performance of your marketplace, and is a key success factor in holding a conversation with your customer — and in converting that conversation to revenue.
How to Tune Your Ecommerce Site-Search – Not Replace it
searchHub.io uses AI to integrate customers into your site’s search, with their unique ways of searching, their needs, and their preferences. Our AI technology predicts and understands what customers want, seamlessly and fast. We do this through intelligent query clustering, and through understanding the complex and unique characteristics of your customers queries to make search more intelligent, and tailored to each individual who visits your marketplace.
Most standard site-search solutions are not optimized for the critical requirements marketplaces must deal with, such as large product catalogs, high site performance and scalability, and fast-changing product availability.
Managing your audiences’ broad search choices
A broader range of products means that visitors have more choice, which attracts more customers, and leads to increased revenue and profitability. This rule applies both to horizontal marketplaces where customers can find a wide range of products (e.g., otto.de), and vertical marketplaces where customers can find more specialized products (e.g., zalando.de).
That’s why many marketplaces develop their own site-search solution based on Solr or Elastic, the most common open-source technologies. But these technologies don’t provide search results that are relevant to all users out-of-the-box. With a wider range of products, your long tail in search increases, and your site-search has to manage a much wider range of problems (long tail is the broad variety of search and keywords customers use when searching for the same thing). This can dramatically affect your search result quality.
Your site search is your business card
Your catalog is the way you introduce your marketplace to your visitors. Search is a key touchpoint in the buying process. It’s the place where the users are telling you what they want. If your search engine speaks the same language as your users, search becomes a conversation, and a conversation is the first step to a relationship.
Therefore, search is the most vital function on your marketplace. Many businesses make high investments in product descriptions and other site content, but then lose their customers due to a poor search experience.
Like any other e-Commerce site, marketplaces need to make sure that the process of product discovery is frictionless: visitors need to find and compare products easily, without wasting their time browsing an infinite catalog.
Most marketplaces offer only limited capabilities of clustering search behavior. This means if a customer types in a more complex search term, there is a good chance of zero results and your customer will leave your marketplace. With searchHub’s AI technology, we automatically cluster millions of user and search queries by meaning and proximity. Deep learning testing and optimization continuously tests search queries for their economic outcome and optimizes the query rewrites accordingly in near-time.
We are hiring
If you’re excited about advancing our search|hub API and strive to enable companies to create meaningful search experiences, join us! We are actively hiring for Data Scientists to work on next-generation API & SEARCH technology.
www.searchhub.io proudly built by www.commerce-experts.com
