Google Launches Retail Search Tool For Shopping Sites

April 8, 2023 | E-Commerce

Google keeps launching features, updates, and tools to make our search experience better and easy. 

It recently released a retail search tool to improve shopper discovery on shopping sites.

The tool comes as a fully managed service under Google Cloud’s Product Discovery Solutions for Retail suite.

But, do shopping sites need it?

Yes, they do. 

Today’s shoppers know what they want. But if the site search fails to understand what they are looking for, they’ll go away.

In other words, irrelevant or inaccurate, or no search results on shopping sites are a big problem. 

They lead to high bounce rates and cart abandonments, causing heavy business losses. It’s an industry-wide issue, and most shopping sites struggle with it.

Google’s retail search tool can help them fight it better. 

They can offer a Google-quality search experience to their customers using the tool.

Relevant search results can be displayed instantly, without having the customers refine their search query several times or give up their shopping journey.

Additionally, they can get higher conversions, increase user retention, and build brand loyalty. 

But before we talk more about the retail search tool, I want you to ensure your site’s SEO is on point.

You can use RankWatch’s free Website Analyzer and get a quick yet comprehensive SEO report for your site.

It will show you the current statistics and highlight areas that need improvements (if any).

You can make changes to your site and re-check its SEO performance from time to time. It will help you rank better and drive more organic traffic to your site.

Now, let’s come back to extending your on-site search capabilities:

What is the retail search tool capable of?

The tool comes with advanced query understanding, which enables e-commerce websites to:

  1. Understand the search intent
  2. Return accurate and relevant results
  3. Offer personalized recommendations

It performs a quick, thorough query analysis to gauge the product properties/attributes.

Post that, it scans through hundreds or thousands of products to generate the search results. 

It matches the search query with the site’s content and populates relevant products in the SERP.

The search results are refined based on customer interaction, customer history and ranking models.

And guess what? All this happens within seconds.

It creates a big difference by enhancing the customer’s shopping experience on the site.

Buyers don’t bounce back, conversions on the site increase, and losses are reduced significantly.

If shopping sites need more reasons, let’s look at the benefits in detail.

What are the benefits of using the tool?

Google, its products and its vision are all thoughtful. So is the tool with direct and indirect benefits. 

Let’s begin with the direct benefits of the shopping sites

  1. Providing Good Quality Search Results

Most e-commerce sites offer a search option to their customers but fail to return what users are looking for in one go. 

Users must type in the exact matching query or make broad search inquiries to find relevant products. 

That’s the classic search algorithm that works in the background. And shoppers don’t like it anymore.

Sites need to provide adequate search results by understanding the customer’s intent and context.

That’s what the tool helps them do. Now, who would refuse to get Google’s superior search capabilities?

  1. Recommending Similar Products Accurately

Product suggestions are important for engaging buyers and attracting them to purchase more from the site.

But, most e-commerce sites don’t have this capability, even if they badly want and need it. 

The tool comes with this power, allowing faster and more relevant product discovery. 

Thus, shopping sites can easily provide useful product recommendations to customers. It will retain users on their site and boost their sales.

  1. Offering a top-notch shopping experience

Since the online shopping industry is highly competitive, customers’ shopping experience becomes important for growth.

Google’s retail search tool provides a user-friendly interface for shopping sites. They can do searches as conveniently as they do on Google and immediately get what they want. 

There’s no waiting, no time lag, and frustration for the buyers. In fact, it leads to a hassle-free buying journey. Thus, it enables shopping sites to level up their user experience. 

  1. Reducing costs for shopping sites

The high bounce rate on e-commerce sites has been quite expensive for retailers. 

In other words, search abandonment has been a major cause of loss in e-commerce businesses. 

It leads to a decline in sales, shrinking the profits and raising the inventory costs. 

By enhancing the user experience, shopping sites can control their bounce rate to a large extent. And as user retention boosts, sites can expect higher conversions. 

Besides conversions, sites can easily keep their inventories moving and minimize additional warehouse costs. In this way, losses can be significantly lowered.

Enticing, isn’t it? 

While everything is good, there’s one worry that might trouble you:

What about the privacy and security of the site’s data?

Google has clarified that its Retail Search models are specific to a site’s data. 

It is kept isolated and is not accessed by Google for any reason, including improving Google’s search engine. 

However, the data is used by the Retail Search models to learn over time and provide better search results. 

The next thing you’d be wondering about is here:

How to get started?

To add the search smarts to your shopping sites, you need to avail the new managed Retail Search service from Google Cloud.

It’s a full-stack service that has all capabilities of a search engine, rather than individual components of just ranking or just indexing, and so on.

You need not feed the retail search models data or worry about traffic spikes. The tool runs flawlessly as long as it is implemented. 

With that, everything has been said!

Do you have any more questions about Google for Retail’s search tool? Let us know in the comment box below.

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2 Comments

  1. Precious post for digital marketers. Thanks for sharing this content. Please keep it up.

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