Coveo a provider of AI-powered relevance platforms that supports digital experiences has released its new Coveo Merchandising Hub. The Hub was designed to support merchandisers to create personalised experiences that convert. It provides a comprehensive feature set that enables brands to deliver a highly relevant shopping journey that helps to build loyalty and increase profitability.
The Merchandising Hub features an intuitive interface that enables merchandising teams to drive value by quickly operationalising campaigns. Teams gain insights on revenue opportunities. They can customise product discovery, and create recommendation strategies for different audiences and geographies at scale. It provides other revenue-driving tactics without relying on IT. Innovative AI allows teams to experiment, learn, and optimise online store performance.
Built on Qubit technology
The technology supporting the Coveo Merchandising Hub is the culmination of Coveo’s October 2021 acquisition of Qubit. A London-based company that provided AI-powered personalisation technology for fashion brands and retailers. The integration of Qubit’s technology into Coveo Relevance Cloud platform enables Coveo to offer a more comprehensive commerce product discovery suite.
“The acquisition of Qubit was critical to our ability to expand the functionality of the Coveo Relevance Cloud. To offer the first comprehensive suite of tools designed for merchandisers,” said Laurent Simoneau, Co-Founder, President, and CTO at Coveo. “The Coveo Merchandising Hub will help brands to overcome current challenges by modernising the merchandising function. By using its valuable insights, it guides strategic decision-making. This helps to create more value and increase profitability by optimising and refining the customer shopping experience.”
The Coveo Merchandising Hub includes easy-to-use features and provides detailed insights on how shoppers interact with retailers’ product catalogues. This enables merchandisers to quickly adapt and deploy the winning strategies to optimise campaigns and revenue per visit. It will also help boost specific products for revenue, and showcase higher-margin products.
AI and merchandising innovations include:
- 1:1 Personalised Search Results: Delivers highly relevant and personalised product rankings in real-time based on shopper intent. This is managed without the need for high volumes of data, pre-defined persona segments, or logged-in user profiles.
- Intelligent Facet Generator: Helps retailers with large and complex product catalogues that may span thousands of product attributes. With the Facet Generator, customers see the most relevant filtering options for each search query, reducing friction and improving conversion.
- Product Listings Manager: Allows merchandisers to easily manage product rankings on listing pages with an intuitive visual editor. Merchandisers benefit from the power of AI to tailor results for specific objectives, such as boosting special promo brands.
- Personalised Content: Enables merchandisers to rapidly deploy campaigns and promotional content at any point in the customer journey. This is achieved with a simple drag-and-drop capability.
- Advanced Decisioning Recommendations: Provides merchandisers with accessible insights and controls for recommendations and audience prioritisation. Merchandisers can explicitly layer business logic on top of AI. These strategies scale for multiple regions, catalogues and audiences.
- Product Badging: Simplifies product badging for merchandisers and makes it very simple to create complex decisioning logic. Real-time data allows it to effectively scale for any type of strategy, from social proofing to scarcity and urgency badging.
A game changer for merchandisers?
“We believe the Merchandising Hub is a game-changer for merchandisers,” said Brian McGlynn, General Manager of Commerce Solutions at Coveo. “Their world today in many cases is defined by thousands of manual rules. Now with 1:1 personalisation and automatic facet generation, they can let AI do the heavy lifting. They can use their skills to experiment and make a much more powerful impact.”
Coveo customer Kurt Geiger is a leading London-based footwear and accessories retailer that focuses by creativity and kindness. The company was recently a silver winner in the Fashion/Apparel or Footwear category at the UK eCommerce Awards. It also relies on Coveo’s AI-led 1:1 personalisation to deliver customer experiences that make every shopper journey feel authentic.
“Working with Qubit and now Coveo has been tremendously rewarding,” said Gareth Rees-John, Chief Digital Officer at Kurt Geiger. “With social proof experiences alone, we achieved 11 times our return on investment. Their continual innovation has enabled us to provide better and increasingly more relevant shopping journeys to our global customer base. We look forward to exploring the new capabilities of the Coveo Merchandising Hub.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business.
Merchandising products for brands and retailers remains one of the most challenging, yet underrated activity in the eCommerce space. It’s an essential ingredient to ensure customers have an effective and enjoyable user experience on a brand’s digital real estate. However, it remains an activity that retailers often get wrong which leads to disastrous results. Customers fail to engage with a brand and articulate poor experience on social media.
Coveo believes that relevance and personalisation are critical for businesses to win in the new digital experience economy and serve people the way they expect. They also see that applied AI is an imperative.
Coveo’s new proposition sounds compelling. Coveo Merchandising Hub is a new solution with innovative capabilities that enable digital merchandisers to leverage tools and data intelligence to boost relevance and profitability. The company says it will provide a completely new proposition for brands.
A fully managed commerce service that enables brands to deliver their personalisation ambitions through strategic tools and new features. However, does the Coveo have the technological depth or infrastructure to compete with the existing established players in this area? There are multiple companies in retail offering tailored solutions to drive personalisation and a more intuitive understanding of customers. Brands and retailers will have to just watch this space.
