Technology has scaled up the floor of our lives by an extraordinary margin, but the best part is that this improvement didn’t run through a linear channel. Instead, many aspects of our life were redefined in the process and a better world was born. One such aspect where our experience got outright reshaped was the aspect of shopping. If we go back by a decade or two, we would see how every discussion about shopping was done in the context of brick and mortar stores. Using just a few clicks to get what you want delivered at your doorstop was nothing more than a pipe dream, and that’s where e-commerce caused its first disruption. It really changed the conversation by making the possibility of online shopping much more feasible. All of a sudden, shopping became an experience for everyone. Even the people who didn’t essentially like brick and mortar shopping were able to make purchases and that too without wasting any time. This e-commerce revolution paved the way for giants like Amazon to take over the world. However, Amazon’s powerful leap to the top of the food chain did leave many other independent retailers with no option but to suffice with the market breadcrumbs.
While it’s easy to paint Amazon as the villain for using tactics like extreme discounting, which would make their price unbeatable in the market; other retailers have also struggled due to their own shortcomings. For example, substandard search capabilities have long kept many retailers from converting site traffic to sales. As per the research conducted by Google Cloud, the search abandonment issue costs US retailers more than $300 billion a year.
“The industry has traditionally focused on cart abandonment, but it has ignored all the things that happen before customers get to the cart,” says Srikanth Belwad, product manager at the Google Cloud Group.
Having studied the situation, Google has come to the rescue of these retailers with an AI-driven tool called Retail Search. Retail Search offers tailor-made solutions, so regardless of how complex your needs are, it can prove to be a helpful tool in bolstering sales conversion. The tool’s primary set of features includes auto-complete, personalized results, and a machine learning structure that ensures the system is getting better with every search. Furthermore, Google isn’t just providing in-site technology to these e-commerce platforms. The company understands that for converting the traffic to sales, they must attract right type of traffic first, so to achieve that, SEO and other related program are expected to come into play as well.
Equipped with a Google-backed cutting-edge setup, retailers would be hoping to take some market share off from Amazon.