Algolia’s New AI-Powered Merchandising Suite Empowers Retailers To Automate Merchandising During Peak Periods and Flash Sales

Blazing fast speed, massive scalability, powerful merchandising tools available from a single console as a no-code solution

Algolia, the leading API-First Platform for Search & Discovery, unveiled a new Merchandising Suite that will transform the way merchandisers can design and execute differentiated merchandising based on real-time signals, product availability, and promotional strategy. This suite provides significant time and cost savings as well as massive scalability, especially during peak sales periods and retail events, with the ability to scale up to 4.5+ billion search queries in a single event with peaks reaching 7.2M requests per minute.

The new Algolia Merchandising Suite dramatically reduces the complexity for merchandisers to efficiently orchestrate product display, promotions, pricing adjustment, and inventory management from a single, no-code, merchandising console. And they can do so by leveraging both AI-based automation and business rules settings to anticipate and respond to planned and unplanned situations seamlessly.

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“Just as products in a store are strategically positioned for maximum impact, a digital merchandiser must position their products in the right categories and optimally surface these categories and subcategories when the customer is browsing their digital store.”

The Algolia Merchandising Suite includes category-level merchandising and powerful, artificial intelligence (AI)-based optimizations that enable automatic re-ranking and drive machine learning (ML)-based recommendations. This ensures that conversion rates remain high during busy traffic periods, for example during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.

During demanding sales events, merchandisers want to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. There are many competing strategic considerations that a merchandiser must take into account to ensure that the right product is surfaced to the consumer instantly and profitably. Algolia’s Merchandising Suite delivers a powerful combination of massive product catalog and inventory data management in real time with AI-led automation techniques, while enabling merchandisers to implement key business strategies.

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The Algolia Merchandising Suite provides significant control and flexibility with the following powerful components:

• Merchandising Console: The console enables commerce teams to easily create and execute strategies, analyze performance in real-time, and make appropriate adjustments, all from a single location;
• Visual Editor: This allows merchandisers to build, deliver and control a superior customer experience without manual dependencies. They can seamlessly zoom in and out of category-level strategies and implementations, perform rapid tests with product placement and promotions by pinning, hiding, boosting, burying or filtering items to create the most visually appealing pages, aided by the attractiveness score at the category or product level;
• Analytics: This provides the ability to measure and improve the impact of a merchandising strategy through insights gained from user engagements from a category page or query. Analytics serve as the merchandiser’s source of truth for identifying the best or worst performing categories or inventory levels, popularity scores, and other metrics to help optimize their promotions, seasonal strategies or A/B test experiments for greater profitable impact.

“Digital Merchandisers are core to the success of an ecommerce business and we’ve built the Algolia Merchandising Suite specifically with this audience in mind. We studied ‘a day in the life of a merchandiser’ and applied insights to design a suite of offerings that can maximize user benefits,” said Bharat Guruprakash, chief product officer, Algolia. “Just as products in a store are strategically positioned for maximum impact, a digital merchandiser must position their products in the right categories and optimally surface these categories and subcategories when the customer is browsing their digital store.”

The Algolia Merchandising Suite comes with a comprehensive library of easy-to-follow, instructional ‘how to’ videos, best practices, and industry knowledge developed specifically for merchandisers to help them get up and running fast with this solution, as well as begin testing and optimizing their merchandising strategies.

“Merchandising, especially over the last two years, has become pivotal to delivering delightful customer experiences,” continued Guruprakash. “Furthermore, with increasingly fierce competition in the retail industry coupled with changing consumer behavior, we believe merchandisers need to respond instantly to market conditions and promotion results using real-time insights. Algolia’s Merchandising Suite will help merchandisers optimize their offerings more quickly with the help of real-time, data-driven insights in order to compete more effectively and more profitably.”