• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 29, 2023

When U.S. consumers believe they have experienced a successful search on a retail website, 92% will purchase the item. Some 78% also purchase at least one additional item.

In addition,on average, the consumer will purchase three additional items after a successful search, according to a Google Cloud-commissioned Harris Poll survey of nearly 13,500 adults.  

The results of the survey, fielded last last year, support Google Cloud’s integration with Shopify announced this week. The partnership lets Shopify customers embed Google-quality search and browsing capabilities into their ecommerce websites and mobile apps using Shopify Commerce Components and Google Cloud’s Discovery AI for Retail.

The integration is available to the more than 2 million Shopify merchants globally.

Rainbow Shops, a Shopify merchant and retail apparel chain with more than 1,000 stores, adopted the feature early on after experiencing limitations with other search and product discovery solutions.

The early tests found that Google Cloud's solution could deliver helpful results to an assortment of test queries each time. The company also experienced an immediate reduction in the amount of time and effort its teams spent on manually refining search results, creating redirects, and pulling up to 50 other levers to get useful results.

This integration aims to give Shopify customers the tools to combat search abandonment -- when a shopper searches for a product on a retailer’s website or mobile app, but doesn’t find the items.

Google estimates search abandonment costs retailers more than $2 trillion annually globally, and more than $234 billion in the U.S. alone.

The Google Cloud-commissioned survey was conducted with nearly 13,500 adults ages 18 and older in 14 countries who have visited a retail website and used the search function in the past six months.

The survey also found that U.S. shoppers depend on the search function or search box when shopping online. Some 69% said it is the most common way they search for products on retail websites, and 63% said they use general website browsing. About 88% of consumers say a good search function is very important or absolutely essential when visiting a retail website.

The study also found that some 78% of U.S. consumers and 72% globally said they are less loyal to a brand when it’s difficult to find what they want on a website. 

Some 81% in the U.S. and 80% global say that after an unsuccessful search experience on a retail website they are more likely to leave the site and purchase the item elsewhere. About 82% in the U.S. and 77% global say they avoid websites where they have experienced search difficulties in the past.