Introducing Search

We’re thrilled to reveal one of our biggest product launches to date: Search. 

This latest AI-powered addition to the Nosto suite opens up massive opportunities for retailers to create personalized, authentic, and relevant customer experiences at every touchpoint through a single platform. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at the features of Search and explore how they will revolutionize your workflow and elevate your product discovery to new heights. But before we delve into the details, let’s take a moment to understand why we’ve developed Search. 

Our Search is more than just any search provider

E-retailers are continuously striving to improve their customer experience and make it easier for shoppers to find the products they are looking for. One vital element to achieve this is a robust site search. In fact, 69% of online shoppers immediately go to the search bar when they land on a site, while 80% have left an online store due to poor search performance*. The importance of an effective search function can therefore not be emphasized enough.

Search providers are not in short supply, but ecommerce retailers are looking for a new generation of search solutions that can keep pace with the dynamic changes in the industry.  

They expect their search to be not only automated and self-learning, but also personalized and intelligent. This is to reduce the time and effort required to implement and maintain search while delivering highly relevant results. Retailers are also seeking to keep control and provide fully merchandised search results that align with their business goals. 

The main challenge for retailers lies in disparate experience tools that don’t communicate with each other, because inconsistency makes the customer experience less impactful. 

That’s why our Search was built to create unique and compelling experiences for both merchants and shoppers! 

Now let’s take a closer look at what we bring to the market.

Unveiling Search

Out-of-the-box relevancy: Do less, achieve more 

The foundation of a successful search experience is relevance—but achieving relevancy is challenging due to the massive data and complex shoppers’ queries that retailers must manage. 

To meet this challenge, Nosto utilizes Natural Language Processing and self-learning algorithms to understand the meaning behind words and find relevant results without additional configuration. NLP works by analyzing the customer’s query, breaking it down into its constituent parts, and matching it against all product textual fields like title, categories, attributes, and sometimes descriptions.

In addition, Nosto’s search is constantly learning from users’ behavior. It provides relevant results even if shoppers mistype a query, use different forms of a term  (e.g. party dress or dress for partying), or compound words—all of that and in more than 30 languages. 

“Customer searches these days are a little more specific, a little more demanding. They’re not just searching for a polo; now, it’s a polo with striped collar or a polo with a print pattern. So for us, I love that Nosto’s Search can recognize things like color.” – Lexis Kambour, Ecommerce Manager at Perry Ellis  

Poor relevancy and tedious manual work to fix it are now a thing of the past. Say hello to enhanced customer satisfaction, higher site retention, and increased conversions without hassle.

What you get at a glance:

• Search powered by NLP algorithms
  • Self-learning algorithms based on users’ behaviors
    • Error tolerant spell-check
    • Predictive synonym detection (coming soon)
    • Stemming
    • Support for compound words
  • Multilingual support in over 30 languages

Keep control of your search results ranking with powerful merchandising

Relevancy: checked! Now it’s time to focus on aligning search results with your company’s strategic goals. Manipulating the ranking to promote or demote products based on attributes and performance is the extra layer your search needs for a genuinely effective search.

Unfortunately, 64% of brands miss out on this opportunity by not being able to merchandise their search results*.

Whether your focus is on maximizing profitability, streamlining inventory, or boosting revenue, Nosto has you covered with a comprehensive list of merchandising rules that can be easily combined and weighted to influence search ranking. With our Search, you can immediately see how your search ranking would look on specific queries, allowing you to easily monitor and adjust your strategy for optimal results.

What you get at a glance

• Global Merchandising Rules

With Global Merchandising Rules, you can impact all searches with just one rule, making it easy to scale your merchandising efforts. For example, you can boost products that have high views but also have a good margin and inventory on all the SKUs. 

Merchandising rules can be adjusted at any time and scheduled in advance to respond to specific needs during the year.  Read how our client A.L.C. used a specific rule during the sale and doubled their CVR on search. 

• Query Rules

Sometimes you may need a more specific strategy for certain search queries and want to override the global merchandising rule. Nosto’s query rules provide the solution you need to optimize your search results on a query-by-query basis. 

For example, if you want to boost the revenue of a category, you can set a merchandising rule for a strategic query like “bags” to prioritize products that have a high price. This can be especially useful in a category with a wide range of products and prices, where low-priced items are often the first ones to be surfaced on the results. 

Be ahead of the competition with personalized search ranking

Did you know that 70% of shoppers are more likely to purchase if the search results are personalized? Yet, 66% of brands don’t offer personalized search results*.

Nosto’s search gives you the opportunity to stand out from the competition by offering a unique, personalized shopping experience to your customers. 

With the ability to personalize search results for individual shoppers or specific segments, you can improve relevancy and ultimately conversion. For example, our client Perry Ellis leverages segments to provide a better experience for “Discount Affinity Shoppers.” By boosting discounted items to the top of the search results, Perry Ellis can cater to their customer’s preferences and drive better results. 

Additionally, our search utilizes the same behavioral and transactional data that is used in the other Nosto experience modules such as product recommendations, personalized content, and category merchandising. This allows for a consistent, cohesive shopping experience throughout your online store, improving customer loyalty and driving more sales.

What you get at a glance

• 1:1 personalization attribute in the merchandising setup
• Ability to create specific merchandising rules for certain segments of clients

Elevate your search with a rich feature-set 

Designed to address both the small details and the more basic elements of a search feature, Nosto’s Search helps you provide the most advanced experience without heavy manual work. 

What you get at a glance

• Contextual dynamic filters & facets. Shoppers want an easy way to narrow down search results. Our product uses the context of each search query to show only relevant filters and facets on the search results page. For example, if a customer searches for shoes, we won’t show them filters for TV types.

• Predictive products (live), keyword, content, and category autocomplete (coming soon). Nosto’s autocomplete makes searching easy and efficient by predicting users’ intent and quickly guiding them to their desired search results, category page, or product page. 

“Autocomplete was quite buggy with our previous solution, but with Nosto, the user experience is sleak. And, most importantly, it gives me relevant predictions for what I’m typing in” Lee Mcnamara, Ecommerce Manager at Gym+Coffee

• Insightful Analytics. Optimize your search results and merchandising by making data-driven decisions. Stay ahead of the game by catching trending products based on popular search requests that retrieve no results. Not only does Nosto’s analytics inform your search strategy, but it can also benefit other parts of your business.

“Nosto’s analytics give some good insights around no results queries that we didn’t have access to before. It’s helpful to see what queries are being regularly made that retrieve no results—not just for us to consider how synonyms can mitigate these, but also to highlight opportunities for the likes of our buying teams” Chris Longshaw, Ecommerce Manager at SikSilk. 

• AI synonyms (coming soon). Our search automatically learns synonyms and typos, allowing you to spend less time fixing basic relevancy issues and more time refining your merchandising strategies.
• Content search (coming soon). Incorporate relevant content in your search results page. Nosto’s Search finds products, but also relevant content like articles, FAQ pages, and more. This helps drive more sales potential but also establishes you as a trusted brand.. 

Get the best search experience in no time with fully customizable frontend and fast go-live

Nosto’s Search is designed with the limited bandwidth of ecommerce teams in mind, making implementation simple and efficient to maximize time to value.

What you get at a glance

The implementation consists of two parts:

• Indexing of product data, which includes both textual fields (e.g. title, attributes, categories) and business data fields (profit margin, stock availability, ratings). 

This process is effortless, the index of your catalog is done simply by connecting Nosto to your store. Our dedicated Customer Success team will then guide you through the search setup process in Nosto’s backend.

• Front-end implementation, for search results and autocomplete. Nosto offers two implementation methods to meet your needs:
  • Pre-built templates for a fast go-live. Templates are fully customizable through Nosto’s backend code editor. 
  • API documentation for more complex use cases, catering to retailers with specific requirements. 

And voilà! 

Connect once, deploy everywhere with Nosto Experience Platform

With the addition of cutting-edge search technology, Nosto’s experience platform has become the complete solution for retailers looking to build compelling customer journeys from start to finish. With AI at the forefront, thorough Personalization & Visual UGC solutions,  A/B testing capabilities, centralized data & analytics, and a unique platform, retailers have the tools they need to make every impression relevant!

“We first started with on-site personalization, moved to merchandising, and then email. Now we’ve moved into Search because we’re super happy with all the Nosto products we’ve been using and we’re seeing success from our personalization strategy,” Hilary Peterson, Marketing and Ecommerce Lead at ALC

Unlock the full potential of Nosto’s Commerce Experience Platform

If you are already a Nosto client, connect with your dedicated CSM for a personalized tour of Nosto’s Search capabilities. 
And, if you’re not yet a Nosto user, our team of ecommerce experts is ready to show you how Nosto’s Search can elevate your online shopping experience. Book your demo now!

*research taken from Nosto’s research report The Future of Ecommerce search. You can download that here.