Ruleless eCommerce for the Holiday Season and Beyond: AI-First Search and Recommendations

The holiday shopping season is retailers' most critical time of year - every sale counts. To win over consumers and stand above their competitors, retailers need to provide seamless, optimized shopping journeys, especially online. This starts with a hyper-personalized, accurate search experience.

However, data shows that this is a missed opportunity for most retailers, with the industry losing $2 trillion each year globally to search abandonment. The problem is that many retailers still rely on legacy solutions to power their search and product discovery experience. These outdated, rule-based systems rely on predefined rules or algorithms to determine search results and product recommendations. While these systems can effectively handle structured data and simple queries, they can become cumbersome and inflexible when dealing with complex search behaviors, evolving product catalogs and rapidly changing consumer preferences.?

The Challenges of Legacy Product Discovery Solutions

Legacy product discovery solutions often rely on a combination of historical sales data, seasonality and merchandiser intuition to serve up relevant search results. While this approach once had its merits, it’s now inherently limited in its ability to adapt to real-time changes in consumer behavior and market trends - it’s time-consuming to set up and requires significant effort to maintain and update. Some of the greatest limitations of rule-based systems include:

• Limited flexibility: Difficulty adapting to new trends and product categories
• Lack of personalization: Inability to tailor search results and recommendations to individual customer preferences
• Complexity: Challenges in maintaining and updating complex rule sets

Many retailers today have hundreds or even thousands of business rules in place for their eCommerce search engines, which can be daunting to maintain and update. At best, even the most talented merchandising team can only optimize 3 to 5% of a retailer’s product catalog at any given time.

Leveraging AI-First Product Discovery Tech to Win This Holiday Season

In contrast to legacy merchandising strategies and product discovery technology, AI-first merchandising leverages advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. This allows for a more dynamic and responsive approach to product placement, ensuring that merchandisers can automatically optimize how products are presented based on business objectives or current consumer behavior and preferences. The result is that many retailers go from thousands of rules to a small handful. In most cases, retailers find that they can be completely ruleless, relying on zero rules to provide highly accurate, hyper-personalized search and product discovery experiences.

Ruleless approaches that leverage machine learning and AI offer several advantages over traditional rule-based systems:

• Enhanced personalization: Ability to learn and adapt to individual customer preferences and behaviors
• Improved relevance: More accurate and relevant search results and product recommendations
• Scalability: Can handle large and complex product catalogs
• Continuous learning: Ability to learn from new data and trending topics and improve over time
• Reduced manual effort: Retailers can save time and resources by eliminating the need for manual rule creation and maintenance
• Faster time to market: New products can be added to the catalog more quickly without requiring extensive rule updates.

In addition, with an AI-first eCommerce Search and Product Discovery platform like GroupBy’s, retailers can still manually override the AI and implement business rules when they wish. For example, when creating new campaigns or wanting to promote a lower-margin item over higher ones to move inventory.?

By leveraging AI-first eCommerce search and product discovery platforms, retailers can significantly reduce their reliance on manual business rule curation. This will improve customer satisfaction, increase sales and give retailers a competitive advantage.?

Retailers who leverage AI-first product discovery solutions will be best positioned for success this holiday season and beyond. Moving away from rigid, time-consuming rule-based systems, retailers can provide better, hyper-personalized shopping experiences that drive add-to-cart and conversions, offering highly relevant and convenient eCommerce experiences.