Klevu Is Helping Retailers Mitigate Supply Chain Issues With Advanced Search Technology

With experts warning about record out-of-stocks this holiday season, artificial intelligence-powered search technology provider Klevu is launching new enhanced analytics tools to help e-commerce retailers gain a competitive advantage.

Klevu CEO and cofounder Nilay Oza said the costs of the supply chain for many retailers has increased 40%, which is eroding margins. Instead of bouncing from a site when a product is out-of-stock, Klevu suggests similar items, with consumers retaining their basket value.

“The benefit of analytics is you optimize search queries from the dashboard,” Oza said. “When you solve the discovery problem properly, you see very interesting results.”

Three new tools, Live View, Word Graph, and Filter Analytics allow retailers to fine-tune their marketing campaigns with actionable, real-time data based on shopper behavior, ultimately boosting conversion and customer experience.

Live View gives retailers real-time heat maps to give them a sense of where and how products are moving. Retailers see the number of searches and product clicks in the last minute. This granular level of information helps e-commerce sites drive more revenue by fine-tuning and geo-targeting their marketing messages. In addition, Live View displays long-tail searches, offering greater search analytics specificity.  

Word Graph helps brand managers make connections between key words that would otherwise go unnoticed. “In the past, it’s been a bit of a gut feeling,” Oza said, adding that marketing conversion rates were very low. Using this tool, retailers can build out high-conversion product copy, find elusive longtail keywords for paid marketing, and discover products for cross-selling.

Filter Analysis enables consumers to find what they are looking for more quickly with fewer clicks. Retailers can use this tool to identify highly-clicked filters on product listing pages and then make those products appear more prominently in search results. 

Oza cited typical online conversion rates of 1% to 3%, but said that when Klevu presents hyper-relevant products to consumers, conversion rates jump to more than 25% and shoppers are three to five times more likely to convert when they find in-stock and relevant products quickly.  

Ashley Hubbard, e-commerce manager at Grenson Shoes, one of Klevu’s 3,000 retail customers, said, “The ability to surface product search results as quickly, accurately and efficiently as possible to users of grenson.com and utilizing the power of Klevu’s AI to make sure we can maximize the types of natural language queries used by our customers, ensures we are always promoting the right products to the right customer at the right time.

“Of course, this is all underpinned by the detailed analytics available within the Klevu dashboard allowing us to make sure we can quickly adapt to specific search trends from customers using language we may not feature within our product listings but can add re-direction rules in for or synonyms within minutes to ensure there are products returned for these search terms,” Hubbard said.

“There’s an evolution happening to utilize these insights,” Oza said. “It’s about tapping into customer intent. We’re going one step deeper into intent to understand and get rich insights into what customers are after. We haven’t even scratched the surface. The more we can learn about consumers through our retail partners, the better retailers can curate products based on how customers are searching.”