The Solution

How does Site Search and Personalization software work?
With Personalized Search, there are two aspects – search accuracy and personalization.

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

Other aspects include Natural Language Processing – the search being able to tell the difference between products, like a table, a chair, or a sideboard, and attributes, like the colour red.

An effective search should also include spelling tolerance, ensuring customers 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 customer and learns, in real time, what their preferences are – search results are ranked in order of preference. So, if the algorithm learns the shopper has a preference for items made out of oak, or has a preference for a certain style of furniture, this is what they will see more of.

Merchandising Cloud Smart Collections takes all the same aspects as Personalized Search and applies them to collection pages to ensure products appearing within collections are ranked according to the customer’s preference, and are not simply a one-size-fits-all static list of products.

Recommendations, then, also draws on these learnings, but in order to increase upsell and cross-sell capabilities – using designated space to highlight products the shopper is most likely to buy.