Algolia is the leader in search, but don’t take our word for it! According to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery, Algolia grabs the top spot for many reasons. Known for speed and global scalability and loved for their performance and ease of use, Algolia’s AI search solution easily integrates with a robust network of leading e-commerce and marketplace platforms.
In pursuit of bleeding-edge search performance, there is no substitute for AI. Yet AI itself is a composable solution–it’s 1+1= 5. Horizontal AI Search solutions like Algolia work best when integrated with vertical AI search solutions, like Lily AI. It’s adding nitrous to a high-performance sports car.
Now, Lily AI’s natural customer language product attributes combined with Algolia’s industry-leading semantic search solution consistently deliver high-performing, personalized search results for some of the most critical yet complex categories in e-commerce: Apparel, Footwear, Bags & Accessories, Furniture and Home Decor, and Cosmetics and Skincare.
Take North America alone, with a revenue of US $233 billion, Fashion was the biggest category in 2023 according to eCommerceDB. The Fashion, Home, and Beauty categories combined generated over one-third of all e-commerce sales. Compare the average SKU counts and seasonality turnover of those categories with the likes of say, electronics and groceries, and it’s no surprise that these high-value categories also skew towards being some of the most nuanced and time-intensive to optimize for in search. Or rather, were challenging without the help of AI.
Algolia + Lily AI: Better Together
Together, Algolia and Lily AI are setting a new standard for search performance for fashion, home, and beauty retailers. It’s not just about generating as many search results as possible; it’s about understanding and then curating the best possible result to make discovery easy and enjoyable in a privacy-friendly way. This is particularly critical for potential new customers, first-time website visitors, niche products, or new products where limited clickstream and past behavioral or purchase data is available and when black box systems aren’t preferred.
Let’s face it, it’s not hard to understand when someone is looking for a classic “Hanes white t-shirt”. This is a classic “head” term that is high volume and only a handful of words (that also happens to be branded). Yet long-tail, descriptive phrases are estimated to make up over 90% of searches! Factor in highly-specific micro-attributes like sleeve fit, home setting, and wand type, or non-brand subjective terms like styles, seasons, occasions, and trends, and it becomes apparent which search platforms are using Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions to bridge the gap of how consumers really speak.
Here’s a look at what this partnership looks like for three different types of retailers.
If you’re an Algolia customer not using Lily AI (yet). . .
With the Algolia-Lily AI partnership, get ready to see fewer null results and never dull results for fashion, home, and beauty products. That’s because Lily AI enriches product data to be more inclusive of customer language that describes items the way your customers do.
Lily AI’s extensive, retail-specific taxonomy includes:
- Objective attributes, like item types and materials
- Subjective attributes, like styles and occasions
- Attribute synonyms, like glossy vs. high shine
- Macro- and micro-trends, like Quiet Luxury, Latte Makeup, Mob Wife, or Urban Aunt
- Consumer language enrichments, like SEO-focused terms and site search queries
This retail data enrichment is made possible through a combination of:
- Computer vision and natural language processing, which analyze catalog items and suggest attributes
- A team of domain experts who review trends and incorporate consumer-centric language into Lily’s models
- The ability to add product attribute tags and meta fields, such as trends and synonyms
If you’re a Lily AI customer using or evaluating Algolia . . .
With the click of a button, brands and retailers using Lily AI can automatically export their product attributes to Algolia’s end-to-end search engine, seamlessly incorporating the highest-converting, customer-centric product attributes available in the market today. Combined with Algolia’s powerful AI search, this enables brands to significantly increase discoverability, conversion rates, and overall customer satisfaction, to help people find the right products every time.
Lily AI’s new Algolia integration all but eliminates any friction between a retailer’s search engine and Lily AI’s attributes. This no-code integration retains the customizability and flexibility that enables businesses to operationalize Lily’s attributes with minimal time and overhead. Once the user has authenticated their account on the platform they can start sending Lily’s data to Algolia in real time.
If you’re not a customer of either . . .
Our partnership is the fastest way to maximize your ecommerce and search performance and sales! You can get started here!
