Shopify and Google Cloud Integrate AI-powered Product Discovery Capabilities

Shopify booth

Shopify and Google Cloud have announced a new integration that allows retailers using Shopify’s enterprise retail solution to access Google-quality search capabilities and AI innovations. This integration, now available globally and in most languages, would increase access to Google’s advanced search and browsing technologies, enabling retailers to create more fluid and fruitful shopping experiences for their customers.

The integration would equip enterprise brands with AI-driven product discovery capabilities that address real-world business challenges.

Google Cloud Retail Search, for instance, would provide 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.

It also includes 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, optimizing how and what products are shown for accuracy, relevance, and likelihood of making a sale.

The integration also provides an AI-driven personalization capability that customizes the results customers get when they search and browse retailers’ websites. The AI underpinning the personalization capability uses a customer’s behavior on an ecommerce site, such as their clicks, cart, purchases, and other information, to determine shopper taste and preferences. Moreover, Google Cloud Recommendations AI would help retailers deliver personalized recommendations at scale. Recent upgrades to Recommendations AI can make a retailer’s ecommerce properties even more personalized, dynamic, and helpful for individual customers.

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Google Cloud - Thomas Kurian
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said that “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.

Integrating Discovery AI Technology

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said that “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. Now, retailers will be able to enhance their digital properties with better product discovery experiences, creating more fulfilling shopping experiences for their customers.”

The integration of Shopify and Google Cloud would provide a solution to the issue of search abandonment, which costs retailers more than $2 trillion annually globally and more than $234 billion in the U.S. alone, according to a Google Cloud-commissioned Harris Poll survey. The survey found that despite the continued rise in online shopping, many shoppers report hurdles in the product discovery experience on retailers’ ecommerce properties.

Online 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%), followed closely by general website browsing (63%). However, only one in 10 U.S. shoppers say they get exact results for their queries (12%) or good alternatives (11%) every time they use the search function on a retailer’s site. In fact, more than three in four U.S. consumers (76%) say that in the past month, they have used the search function or search box on a retail website and did not find the item they were looking for.

Rainbow Shops, a Shopify merchant and popular retail apparel chain with more than 1,000 stores, recently integrated Google Cloud’s Discovery AI for Retail technology directly into its own digital domains. After experiencing limitations with other search and product discovery solutions, Rainbow Shops approached Shopify about the possibility of using Google Cloud’s search and browse capabilities.

Rainbow Shops found that Google Cloud’s solution could deliver helpful results to an assortment of test queries 100% of the time. In addition to accuracy, Rainbow Shops saw an immediate reduction in the amount of time and effort its teams previously spent on manually refining search results, creating redirects, and pulling up to 50 other levers to get useful results.