Vertex AI Search for commerce is a Google Cloud product that provides Google-quality search, browsing, recommendations, and conversational commerce capabilities for your digital properties. It's specifically designed and highly tuned for ecommerce websites and mobile applications. Formerly known as Vertex AI Search for retail, the service has been rebranded.
What Vertex AI Search for commerce can do
- Core capabilities: It combines search and recommendation to help you implement personalized experiences based on machine learning models.
- Goal: Primarily, to increase conversions and reduce search abandonment on your digital platforms. Improve the shopping experience by making it easier for customers to find relevant products.
For more information, see Features and capabilities.
Search as an interaction
Vertex AI Search for commerce offers a range of powerful capabilities designed to enhance the ecommerce experience for your customers and drive business growth.
One way it works is through guided search features. The system can provide relevant suggestions and prompts, even after an initial broad query. These include conversational commerce and conversational filtering, where the system can guide users to refine and narrow broad search queries through AI-enabled conversation. Understanding context, it can prompt users with clarifying questions or suggest specific attributes.
Advanced filtering is also crucial to interactive search. Using Vertex AI Search for commerce, businesses can apply rules to fine-tune what customers see and filter by product availability and custom tags. End users interact with dynamic filtering to narrow search results. These dynamic filtering options adapt and change based on the initial search query and available product attributes in the resulting set and drive interactive search features, such as tiles.
What Vertex AI Search for commerce can do for your users
Using the Merchandising console or the Search for commerce console, site merchandisers and Vertex AI Search for commerce administrators can access and configure controls, as well as use them for search facets.
Vertex AI Search for commerce is a fully managed platform accessible to users who aren't developers, such as ecommerce admins. Google Cloud automatically handles the technical complexities like data preprocessing, training and tuning machine learning models, load balancing, and infrastructure provisioning.
What Vertex AI Search for commerce can do for developers
This service helps developers focus on building engaging user experiences without the complexities of managing underlying AI infrastructure. A detailed breakdown of what Vertex AI Search for commerce can do for developers:
Integrate advanced search capabilities: Developers can embed high-quality search into their websites and mobile applications, enabling users to find products more effectively. Onboarding to Vertex AI Search for commerce can be started with or without Google tools, converging into a streamlined integration pathway. Integrating it includes advanced query understanding that can handle broad search terms.
Build personalized recommendations systems: The platform helps developers deliver highly personalized recommendations at scale. By understanding customer behavior, context, and product attributes, developers can create recommendation engines that drive user engagement across various channels.
Use conversational commerce: Developers can guide users to refine their search queries through back-and-forth conversation, enhancing navigation.
Optimize search and recommendations results: While non-developers can use business rules and ranking models such as increased engagement, revenue, or conversions, they can also apply business rules to fine-tune what customers see. They can diversify product displays and filter by product availability or custom tags through ranking algorithms or dynamically applied logic based on parameters. Developers can optimize search and recommendation results to meet specific business objectives.
Utilize the latest AI: Developers can rely on Google's expertise in AI and machine learning for advanced query understanding and personalization, leading to better search, browse, and recommendation results.
Benefit from a fully managed platform: Vertex AI Search for commerce handles data preprocessing, machine learning model training and hyperparameter tuning, load balancing, and infrastructure provisioning. This significantly reduces burden on development teams.
Seamlessly connect with existing tools: Developers can integrate Vertex AI Search for commerce with a variety of existing Google Cloud services and other tools, such as Google Analytics 360, Tag Manager, Merchant Center, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. This allows for efficient data flow and integration with existing analytics and marketing workflows.
Ensure security and privacy: The platform provides strong access controls to ensure data isolation, giving developers confidence in the privacy of their users' data.
Access comprehensive documentation and resources: Developers can find detailed documentation, guides, client libraries (including REST and RPC references), pricing information, and release notes to assist with implementation and integration.
What Vertex AI Search for commerce can do for business and marketing
Vertex AI Search for commerce enhances the online shopping experience and drives revenue by doing the following:
Drives digital commerce sites and applications with capabilities highly tuned for ecommerce.
AI-powered search optimized for product ranking increases click-through, order value, and conversions, and reduces search abandonment and No Results Found.
If guided search is enabled, it refines broad search queries through back-and-forth conversation with the user.
Returns relevant results and highly personalized recommendations for long-tail searches by understanding nuanced user behavior based on search history, context, and SKUs to drive engagement across channels.
Facilitates product discovery through text and images of similar or complementary items in real-time guided search.
Helps manage costs
Vertex AI Search for commerce can help manage costs by being fully managed, eliminating the need for you to preprocess data, train or hypertune machine learning models, load balance, or manually provision infrastructure. Additionally, you can start your proof of concept with free credit and benefit from free monthly usage of popular products, including AI APIs.
For more information on this, see Pricing.