How people shop for groceries is changing. Customers shop more often (frequency has risen 4.7%) and have more options than ever before. They can visit a store, order online for delivery, choose a subscription, or select only the parts of each model they like best. And they can do it all from a mobile device.

In 2025, use of online grocery shopping rose 30.4%, and that number continues to climb. 138 million people in the US alone will shop for groceries online in 2025, and the total will only increase over time. Leading grocery retailers must capitalize on this trend.

Algolia’s intelligent grocery solution helps you provide your customers with a simple, intuitive online grocery shopping experience that they can navigate using natural language.

Instead of keyword-linked rote results, our AI-power shopping assistant provides a responsive and interactive search journey. Consider it a branded guide that not only helps your customers locate the exact products they’re looking for but also offers choices they might not have known they wanted.

Improve your customers’ online shopping experiences with Algolia’s shopping assistant. Eliminate friction, increase conversions, and deliver targeted personalization that enhances every online encounter, all while reducing your operational burden.

Easy lists, fast

A shopping assistant transforms each shopper’s ideas and intent into purchases. Powered by conversational AI, it allows customers to shop how they think, turning natural language queries and prompts into recommendations, recipes, and lists added to ready-to-checkout baskets.

A customer can enter a query like “a meal for two with pork” directly into the search bar. Instead of merely returning pork products by name, the shopping assistant can offer further prompts, such as dietary restrictions or price ranges. The customer might add “dairy-free” or “$50.” Then the shopping assistant surfaces meal suggestions that suit the prompts, including complementary dishes and recipes, all of which can be turned into basket-ready orders.

It doesn’t stop there. If a customer uploads a photo of their shopping list, the shopping assistant can read it and assemble a basket, using past purchases to select the customer’s preferred brands. It can even analyze a photo of a specific meal or dish to identify the ingredients and produce a list of appropriate items for a fast and easy checkout.

The impact on business is significant. Making the right recommendations increases both overall conversion and average order values. Producing timely and relevant suggestions reduces bounce rates, resulting in fewer abandoned carts. Customers feel recognized and valued, which builds real loyalty and retention.

With AI-powered personalized search, retailers can also tailor promotions. The more customers interact with the assistant, the more accurate and helpful the predictive models become. Delivering targeted discounts on the right products at the right time gives grocers a chance to promote own-label items, increasing their margins while also saving their customers money.

Real-time inventory visibility

Item substitution is a major pain point for customers. Shoppers want what they ordered. Too much substitution can drive customers away for good. Grocers want to reduce customer frustration and churn: Algolia’s shopping assistant can help.

Whether visiting in person, buying online to pick up in store (BOPIS) or choosing to have their groceries delivered, your customers deserve to know they’re getting what they want. Algolia can help your shoppers find what’s actually available at the moment they’re looking, so there are no unpleasant surprises upon delivery or pick up.

AI search & personalization

Today’s customers expect personalization in their online shopping experiences. Algolia can help you deliver customized search results for every shopper. Historical data such as past purchases and preferred brands form the base of every customer profile. But Algolia’s shopping assistant goes further, personalizing each search journey using real-time interactions, capturing what a customer is looking at in the moment and adapting search results as it happens.

This real-time intelligence doesn’t slow search and discovery. Instead, it helps customers find the right products at the right time: exactly when their interest switches from one category or item to another.

Real-time stock visibility gives your customers an inventory-aware path to discovery. Combining AI ranking with real-time inventory location indexing means your customers automatically know if an item they want is in stock. If not, near-real time personalization allows the shopping assistant to suggest equally appropriate brands based on the customer’s past shopping history as well as their current intent and needs.

Inventory visibility isn’t just for online orders; it also helps customers visiting the store in real life. Whether they’re wandering the aisles looking for inspiration or on a time-limited mission to pick up essentials, customers can quickly check your site to see if the products they want are in stock, and if not, which other locations have it in stock or what other alternatives are. In fact, Gen Z shoppers are more likely to discover new brands online than on store shelves.

Besides ensuring that your customers are both helped and satisfied, inventory visibility also improves demand forecasting. Seasonal trends come and go quickly, but back-end data analytics help grocers predict customer demand, reducing potential spoilage.

Deliver a frictionless experience

Today’s shoppers expect their online grocery experiences to be speedy, relevant, and above all convenient. Algolia’s personalized search eliminates dead ends and makes the shopping process easy and intuitive. Your shoppers get exactly what they want, fast. Even if they have a general idea rather than a specific desire, “salty snacks,” for example, rather than a particular brand of roasted peanuts, the shopping assistant can instantly produce targeted and relevant suggestions.

Algolia’s shopping assistant works with both past sales history and current usage. It responds to signals of interest and intent as well as direct queries to deliver incredibly pertinent product results. Because it can shift contexts in almost real time, it can provide the most accurate product recommendations based on immediate availability.

Shoppers can use everyday language to find what they need, rather than memorizing product names and titles. Favorite products are automatically remembered, reducing the cognitive load customers face and making reorders incredibly fast. Satisfied customers spend more time on the site, resulting in both larger baskets and continued loyalty.

Real value

Your online shopping assistant can turn insights into actions that help you make shopping better for all your customers. As continued micro-interactions build out customer profiles, grocers can analyze a wealth of click-by-click data to produce inventory management and seasonal ordering strategies.

Algolia’s top tier personalization is the key. When you understand your customers’ preferences and shopping habits, you can tailor brand promotions at the most opportune moments. Shoppers appreciate it when their preferences are known and recognized by online platforms.

You can also use generative AI to produce shopping guides. These guides can increase conversion by further informing your customers and giving shoppers a breadth of options, from product specifics to cross-category comparisons. Built-in generative AI can produce informational articles to provide wider context. For instance, if a shopper is comparing milk alternatives, you can surface an article about the health benefits of plant-based choices.

Customers enjoy the convenience of online shopping. Algolia’s shopping assistant bridges the online and in-store experiences, so you can better serve every customer, no matter where they start their journey.

Omnichannel support allows you to communicate your story at every step along the path to purchase. From home screens to the in-store experience, an Algolia shopping assistant means your customers can find guidance and recommendations no matter where or how they search.

Margins reimagined

Widening your customers’ path to discovery also gives grocers a chance to maximize their margins. Balancing shopper satisfaction with profit goals, Algolia’s AI-powered shopping assistant can promote higher margin products in a manner and moment that also benefits customers.

Consider white-label products. Today’s customers see them as a smart, economical choice, and the results speak for themselves: sales of own-label products have grown 6.5%. A shopping assistant can guide customers to own-brand versions of specific products, legitimately encouraging sales of higher margin items.

Value-based shopping is also an important factor to consider. Thirty percent of shoppers prefer brands that align with their own personal social values. Take sustainability, for instance. Customers are willing to pay almost 10% more for brands they know to be sustainably produced. This gives grocers an honest opportunity to promote the sale of premium products.

Algolia’s shopping assistant turns a customer’s mobile device into part of your retail media network. With an omnichannel approach, every screen is a channel to add advertising and co-op revenue streams. Retail media can significantly boost revenue, but only if grocers seize the opportunity.

Time to Market

Adding a shopping assistant to your grocery platform might seem daunting. There are guardrails to install, scaling to manage, compliance to ensure – it can feel overwhelming. But with Algolia’s help, many grocers have rapidly gone live, seeing measurable results within weeks.

Agent Studio is our sandbox platform that helps you quickly create production-ready AI-assisted shopping experiences. When you add your agent to the Algolia search tool, it is immediately connected to your data. You can go live almost immediately. Development time is reduced from months to a matter of minutes.

Algolia’s setup process is smooth and streamlined, designed to reduce your administrative burden and operational load. The shopping assistant seamlessly integrates with our personalization capabilities. Without any extra configuration or development, your shopping assistant will automatically begin to capture your customers’ shopping behaviors, building and modifying their profiles to deliver them with customized, relevant results.

Once up and running, you can test and trial your agent and marketing strategies as needed, saving your internal merchandising team valuable time and effort. Algolia makes it easier on your teams as well as your customers.

Conclusion

Algolia can help you build a customer platform where convenience meets experience. Our AI-powered shopping assistant provides your customers with intuitive search, real-time inventory visibility, and highly personalized recommendations.

Algolia’s shopping assistant makes it easy for your customers to find and buy what they’re looking for. Our customers report that a shopping assistant increases average order size and boosts conversions up to 39%.

With Algolia and Agent Studio you can test and trial your shopping assistant as needed, improving the shopping experience for your customers, building your margins, and lowering your operational load.

The more each customer interacts with the assistant, the more accurate and helpful the predictive models become, until targeted personalization and real-time inventory-aware discovery creates a seamless path from intent to purchase.

Grow baskets, margins, and loyalty with a shopping assistant that truly understands how and why your customers shop.

Discover how Algolia can transform your grocery platform

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