The Results

How does Site Search and Personalization software improve the ecommerce experience?
With the Personalized Search ecommerce tool, there are two aspects – search accuracy, and personalization.

Accuracy is about precision and recall – making the search as smart as possible so that it can return relevant results to the shopper putting in the query. This includes an autocomplete, predicting what they will type as they’re typing, meaning fewer keystrokes for the user.

Merchandising Cloud’s fast and reliable autocomplete solution in operation on Tower Records’ Shopify Plus-powered store.

Other aspects include Natural Language Processing – the search being able to tell the difference between products and attributes.

An effective search should also include spelling tolerance, ensuring shoppers get relevant results even if they make a typo, and a zero results workaround – ensuring relevant products come up even if the exact query searched for is not present.

Personalization, then, is all about the AI algorithm which analyzes the behaviour of the shopper and learns, in real time, what their preferences are – search results are ranked in order of preference. So, if the algorithm learns the shopper frequently needs led lights, or has a preference for a certain colour, this is what they will see more of.

Merchandising Cloud’s Smart Collections solution, meanwhile, includes personalized product ranking, dynamic filters, and the ability to create merchandising rules.

It is possible to customize almost every aspect of the solution: product card look and layout, information contained on product card, layout of the filters, the filtering options and colour swatches, and much more.

It is also possible to integrate with other complementing solutions here (and, indeed, across all three Merchandising Cloud solutions) such as currency converters and wishlist apps – while at the same time keeping the solution running at a lightning fast pace.

Custom horizontal filtering options running on Tower Records’ online store as part of the Merchandising Cloud Smart Collections solution.