Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
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At its Think Retail conference on Tuesday, Google made its annual pitch to merchants to use its search and AI tools—with a few improvements—as they prepare for the holiday season. The tech giant may have lost a landmark ruling to the FTC recently, but that’s not stopping it from finding ways to meet its holiday targets.
In a blog post, the search behemoth said that in the coming weeks, retailers around the world using Merchant Center Next will be able to use Google’s search capabilities to jump on shopping trends that are going viral.
“The trending data is a key way that we can go focus on that, where it’s, here is what users are currently shopping for and looking for right now, and including the words and the way the users are actually framing it, the way they’re searching for it, and allowing the retailers themselves to act on it,” Jeff Harrell, Google’s senior director of merchant shopping, told Retail Brew.
Google said the feature may help retailers “make better informed inventory decisions” and help them craft product descriptions that include key terms shoppers are using to search for items. To cite an example, Harrell wrote in the blog post that retailers using the tool may find that “denim bermuda shorts” are popular, and shoppers are searching for “long denim jorts” to find them.
“[A] five days shorter holiday season is a pivotal thing we need to be thinking about [this year], and this will allow the merchants to be smarter and act faster,” Harrell told Retail Brew. Thanksgiving falls late this November, making this a compressed holiday shopping season.
Google also introduced “generative AI-powered insight summaries” in the analytics tab, which will show merchants “summaries of recent product performance.” This could include things like “how your clicks on denim products were up 20% over last month, so it might be worth re-stocking,” Harrell added.
“We’ll also use AI to answer specific questions about…product data with new custom reports,” Harrell wrote. If a merchant asks for the performance of its bestselling dresses, for instance, Google will “turn over a custom data set with the answers.”
“This year, retailers that turn data into decisions will be set up to win the shopping sprint,” Harrell noted.