What to do with your holiday data

Using an AI search technology that better understands customers’ wants and needs means that shoppers are more likely to purchase, recommend, and repurchase from your ecommerce site.

An essential tool shaping the online retail landscape, Algolia AI Search enables a range of options that can generate more detailed and curated search results and online shopping experiences.

It helps you connect with your online customers and provide them with meaningful product recommendations and suggestions.

If you implemented AI-powered search capabilities for the first time this past retail season or are looking to enhance AI search capabilities moving forward into the new year, here are four important strategies to keep in mind.

1. Improve the relevance of AI search results

Some of the ways to further enhance the quality and relevance of your customers search results:


• Improve textual relevance with typo tolerance and synonyms, taking into account plural forms of words
• Use your business metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and popularity to tune relevance, ensuring that the user sees content or products they are most likely to act on
• Adjust parameters regularly based on up-to-date search analytics. Review the results for your most popular searches with high-click positions and modify for popular searches that generate no results

2. Perfect your UX/UI

Giving online shoppers the ability to find what they are looking for and refine queries in an intuitive way is key to getting the most out of your customers’ online journey.

• Provide a unified search experience that allows users to start by either searching or navigating, then further refining their results by leveraging other strategies like facets
• Display results from the first keystroke in the search bar. Users may be discouraged if search findings only come up following the second or third keystroke
• Highlight and display searchable attributes on a results page. For example if “spandex” appears in the query, highlight “spandex” in the results 
• Use federated search to highlight all you have to offer from different content sources on your site like eBooks, blogs, and documentation

3. Take a mobile-first approach

Adapt search capabilities to the demands of mobile devices.

• Ensure that the search bar is prominent and well-placed on mobile
• Enable device capabilities like the GPS to pre-fill address fields, speech-to-text capabilities, or the use of biometric sensors rather than passwords

4. Increase conversions through personalization

• Personalization can take many different forms depending on the amount of individual user data you have available
• Tools like Algolia's AI Personalization use merchandising data to help teams tailor unique experiences for each and every visitor based on their preferences and real-time in-session behavior