Rainbow Shops enhances search with cloud-based AI

A value fashion retailer is using the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform how customers search for and discover products.

Rainbow Shops recently integrated Google Cloud Discovery AI for Retail technology directly into its e-commerce site and mobile app. The retailer’s internal testing found that Google Cloud's solution could deliver helpful results to an assortment of test queries 100% of the time.

In addition to higher levels of accuracy, Rainbow Shops saw an immediate reduction in the amount of time and effort its e-commerce teams previously spent on manually refining search results, creating redirects, and other efforts to get useful results.

Rainbow Shops is now using Google Cloud Retail Search technology. The retailer was able to fully integrate Google Cloud's AI tools into its online store and mobile app in less than a week in late 2022, in time for its peak Cyber Week seasonal shopping event.

The retailer has already seen improvements in online customer experience, with search volume increasing 48% and its bounce rate on visits has decreasing three-fold. More recently, the company integrated Google Cloud search and browse capabilities into its online store on the Shopify e-commerce platform.

"Now our search bar can handle almost anything our shoppers throw at it, surfacing helpful product results for nuanced queries like 'lbd' (little black dress) and extremely general searches like 'Mardi Gras.' We've also significantly advanced our ability to produce relevant results when a shopper has a typo in their query, which is commonly seen among our many customers now shopping on mobile devices," said David Cost, VP of e-commerce and marketing, Rainbow Shops. "Rainbow Shops is using Google Cloud's AI tools to create an undeniably better shopping experience for our customers."

Rainbow Shops unifies e-commerce data

In addition to optimizing online search and discovery, Rainbow Shops also focuses on obtaining a single view of all e-commerce data. Leveraging SoundCommerce technology, the retailer unifies granular transactional order history and customer engagement data to unlock insights and enable action across its omnichannel operations.

The SoundCommerce platform and retail data model are designed to combine, validate, and stage customer, order, shipment, product catalog, digital marketing campaign and merchandising promotion data. As a result, Rainbow Shops can coordinate decisions and action across marketing, fulfillment and supply chain operations, merchandising, customer service and finance.

Rainbow Shops is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based fashion retailer with over 1,000 locations in the U.S., Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, and online.