Personalized Search vs. Product Discovery: Why They’re Different (and Why That Matters)

Picture this: 

You’re standing in a strange superstore in a faraway country. You know you need to buy sunscreen to battle the scorching heat outside, but trying to find that one tiny bottle of skin-preserving ointment is like finding a needle in a haystack. 

You can’t read the display signs and have no way of knowing where to look first, or even how to ask for what you want. 

Sounds overwhelming, right?

Well, that’s how your customers feel when their search queries don’t get them to the products they need quickly and efficiently.

‘But wait! you protest. ‘My site has clear categories, and search has been working just fine for my customers for years!’ 

Well, the truth is that the majority of today’s retail search engines can only return results based on the traditional method of matching keywords to metadata tags.

If you’re one of these, the chances are your site is outmoded and can’t serve up the precise, varied, and optimized search results that customers need. Customers don’t have time to sift through mounds of irrelevant SKUs—a whopping 75 percent of consumers expect you to make it easy for them to navigate to the products they want. 

To do that, the interface between your customers and your product catalog needs to be sophisticated. If it isn’t, it creates a language barrier between you and your customers—an inability to communicate that results in lost sales, dwindling conversions, and loss of market share to your more digitally articulate competitors. 

Thankfully, by incorporating AI, machine learning, and natural language models, Personalized Search & Product Discovery make it easy for buyers to quickly find exactly what they’re looking for—each in different ways.

What is Personalized Search?

Most of the time, when we enter user queries, we’re driven by a clear goal. Customers have a specific product in mind, and site search is the tool they use to find it. The highly motivated mindset of customers using search makes it ROI dynamite. At any one time, only 15 percent of total site visitors use search, but search accounts for 45 percent of revenue. 

That means that site search is a highly lucrative, high-converting weapon in your ecommerce arsenal—but only if you’re using the right solution for your business. It needs to:

• Understand and meet the searcher’s intent.
• Return relevant results.
• Be customizable and adaptable, making online experiences more convenient.

Hitting these three essential targets requires a personalized search tool that includes the following key features:

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Don’t let the name deceive you— this powerful feature is based on AI-driven technology. It uses highly complex algorithms to understand the way people talk in real life. That means there’s no need for your customers to use ‘computer speak’ for your search tool to understand them. Instead, they can use natural sentence constructions, which NLP will convert into terms the database will understand. 

As customers interact with search, the algorithm learns from their use of language, making your personalized search experience more intuitive and expansive over time. 

Autocomplete

It knows what your customers want before they do! Well, not quite, but a robust autocomplete function not only predicts what term they’re about to type, saving valuable seconds, it can also offer individualized product suggestions based on context. 

Again, your data is put to work to deliver a deeply personalized user experience that gets better at understanding your customers’ needs the more they engage with your site. It delivers more relevant results faster, boosting customer satisfaction. 

Mobile Search

Mobile is coming for ecommerce—60 percent of ecommerce sales now take place via mobile, representing $2.2 trillion in 2023. 

That’s a big number, but there’s no need to be intimidated when it comes to optimizing your site for mobile. Behind all the technicalities lies a simple imperative: make it bigger and easier. 

Despite the increase in the physical size of smartphones, compared to your laptop, phone screens are tiny. That means you have to be pretty obvious with your search bar when designing it for mobile. Make sure it’s:

• Large
• Central
• Touch-responsive
• And voice-activated

What makes search personal—and why is that important?

We know what you’re thinking at this point: is that really all it takes to make search feel personal to your customers? 

Not entirely.

Behind these standalone features, there is one guiding principle: 

The more context you can get your search functionalities to understand, the better the shopping experience will be.

If you can harness everything you know about your customer—all their demographic, location, and historical data—and use it to make your site search more intuitive, relevant, convenient, and, crucially, fast, that’s when you really start to see results. 

What is Product Discovery?

Think of the difference between Ahab, searching for the whale, and Dorothy when she lands in Oz. 

While Ahab is fanatically driven by his all-consuming search, Dorothy wasn’t looking for a technicolor fantasy land: she just got carried away by a strong wind and, presto, she ended up in the place she (didn’t know she) needed to be. 

So while searchers are driven by a strong intent, those customers in ‘discovery mode’ are in an exploratory mindset, open to new possibilities, and keen to learn what you have to offer them. 

What to look for in Product Discovery

So how do you cater to the more serendipitous attitude of Discovery customers, while still moving them along the journey and optimizing conversions? 

By using AI to enhance the capabilities of product discovery, you can craft exceptional personalization that flows seamlessly into your broader CX. 

Product recommendations

Machine learning algorithms make personalized product recommendations based on a whole host of cues, making them more relevant, targeted, and personalized. 

As your recommendation engine learns from past behavior, customer attributes, and context, you quickly and dramatically increase your capacity to make confident, automated decisions on which products to highlight and when. 

Dynamic product bundling

Dynamic bundling revolutionizes the longstanding practice of grouping product offerings together by using customer data to create bespoke product bundles for each shopper. 

Automatically group and display products based on a combination of pre-set business rules and real-time customer data.

Product Finder

A great way to focus the minds of customers in ‘discovery mode’ is with a product finder quiz. Get to know them better with a few simple questions and you’ll be able to offer up some great products that match their preferences and personality. 

Using a short quiz to help customers find products faster has the added bonus of giving you high-quality zero-party data that will make your personalization even sharper the next time they visit.