AI technology allows brands to boost merchandising efficiency, enhance results and move quicker without extra manual work. It achieves this through machine learning and algorithms that improve over time. The product discovery experience of guiding customers to relevant products can be directly enhanced by these AI technologies.

Merchandising teams in particular can benefit greatly from AI as they provide valuable customer insights through real-time analytics. But what are the specific benefits provided by AI, and how are merchandising teams using it to bolster product discovery?

How does AI benefit merchandising teams?

Automated systems save time and money

The driving force behind product discovery is understanding your customer. In order to create intuitive and personalised user experiences, merchandising teams would have to manually analyse customer data to produce actionable insights. This usually involves a considerable amount of time and money to employ dedicated analysts.
AI is able to collate customer data and translate it into relevant products and pages in real-time, automating a personalised shopping experience. Merchandising teams that utilise AI are able to take full advantage of automation to not only personalise the shopping experience, but create focused strategies based on reliable data. This provides merchandising teams with the customer data they need to boost conversion rates whilst simultaneously saving time and resources.

AI-powered search that improves product discovery

On-site search is a vital component of any product discovery platform. Almost every customer will end up using the search bar during their shopping experience, and those that do are 5x more likely to convert and spend 3x as much as those that don’t.
AI-powered search utilises self-learning algorithms based on user data to understand the natural language of customers and connect categories, pages and products together. This can refer to long-tail searches such as, ‘women’s bags that are waterproofed,’ which can be interpreted by AI to present the correct search results even if the language used is not in the product content. Merchandising teams can then take advantage of AI-powered search to provide customers with products relevant to their specific search as well as their shopping history, effectively eliminating the risk of zero search results and significantly boosting sales and conversions.

Tailored merchandising to personalise the customer journey

AI-powered tools allow tailored merchandising where teams can manually control the level of curation that takes place during product discovery. This allows for a brand to work in harmony with the AI systems to rank pages and prioritise brands, colours or styles based on a customer’s specific experience.
A successful combination of AI systems and tailored merchandising can help improve brand awareness alongside maximising revenue and conversions. It also allows businesses to promote time sensitive deals and products to customers that may be interested based on their browsing behaviour, further increasing revenue.

Using AI to Bolster Product Discovery

Superdry

Superdry saw the opportunity to enhance their on-site search capabilities to match the merchandising experience that their in-store brand is known for. They wanted their on-site search to understand complex and unstructured sentences and avoid producing zero results.

Crownpeak's AI-powered search was able to optimise Superdry’s search through self-learning algorithms and smart searches; it utilised smart and relevant features searches to link products together, before using self-learning algorithms to understand the language used by customers and refine the quality of searches. As a result, Superdry saw a 35% increase in conversion rate of affected searches and had £430k-£630 projected revenue uplift per annum.

Harvey Nichols

Harvey Nichols wanted to maintain the high quality shopping experience of their brick-and-mortar stores on their online platforms. They saw an opportunity to inspire their customers to spend more time on their site and explore it in more depth. Crownpeak's AI-powered tools allowed Harvey Nichols’ merchandising team to utilise customer data and provide them with relevant page recommendations to personalise their online shopping experience. After bolstering their product discovery with AI, they saw a 52% uplift in conversions.

Bolster your product discovery with Crownpeak's AI-powered tools

By leveraging AI in product discovery, your ecommerce stores become more relevant, personalised and intuitive. Our clients have seen significant increases in conversion, average order value and revenue, directly attributable to AI site features.

At Crownpeak, we offer an arsenal of AI-powered product discovery tools that can optimise your on-site search, personalise your merchandising and automate discovery processes. Our platform self-learns and continuously improves: adapting to varying factors such as stock turnover, customer volume and persona groups to provide significant boosts to sales and conversions.

Do you want to implement AI into your product discovery journey? To find out more about how Crownpeak's product discovery platform and AI-powered tools can help your online store thrive, request a demo today.