Enterprise brands can now access Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for discoverability through Shopify.
On Thursday, Shopify announced a partnership with Google Cloud to use the latter’s advanced search and browsing technologies for retail, with a focus on tacking search abandonment.
Search abandonment refers to a potential customer leaving their online shopping carts after unsuccessfully finding an item using the search function on a retail website. According to Shopify, this can be a huge and costly problem for enterprise retailers, and its partnership with Google Cloud is aimed at providing a solution.
In a commissioned survey by Google, it found that global search abandonment costs retailers more than $2 trillion per year. Furthermore, it reported that more than half (53 percent) of American consumers say they typically abandon their carts and go elsewhere if there’s at least one item they can’t find on a website.
With this integration, enterprise merchants using Commerce Components—Shopify’s enterprise retail solution—can use Google Cloud’s Discovery AI tools to limit search abandonment. This includes retail search, which provides advanced query understanding to enable e-commerce websites to produce “better” results even from broad queries. Google claims that this tool can match product attributes with website content for fast and relevant product discovery.
Using machine learning, Google’s browse feature can select the optimal ordering of products on a retailer’s site once shoppers choose a category, like “women’s jackets” or “kitchenware.” Other AI functionalities that Shopify’s enterprise merchants can start using today are personalized recommendations and search results when browsing retailers’ websites.
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Shopify launched Commerce Components in January, signing on Mattel, the company behind brands like Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Fisher-Price, as one of its first users.
One of the first Shopify merchants to integrate Google Cloud’s Discovery AI technologies is fashion retailer Rainbow Shops. According to Google, an internal testing done at Rainbow Shops found that the brand 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.
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