Algolia: 'Maintain Focus on Business Value in Your Composable Strategy'

Artificial intelligence and search & discovery are a technological duo made in heaven. Algolia recognized this early on and redefined the search query with an advanced AI search infrastructure to show customers exactly what they are looking for.

Maximilian Schunk, Partner Manager at Algolia, shares important insights about the role of Search & Discovery for your own webshop - with a look at the trends in e-commerce and how brands, manufacturers and retailers can adapt to them with agility.

What is Algolia?

"Algolia enables retailers and brands to provide their customers with lightning-fast, relevant and personalized AI search, recommendation and content discovery experiences across all digital touchpoints," says Maximilian.

"In other words, we are a relevance engine that sits between content and users, and is used wherever dynamic content is played out."

What trends do you see in search & discovery in e-commerce?

"In general, retailers and brands are facing a major challenge in the area of search & discovery: the incredibly high standards set by Amazon, Netflix and the like.

"Customer expectations have risen towards extremely fast, personalized results that reach users at the exact moment when they are most relevant.

"This increases the potential for frustration with non-optimized search experiences on other websites, and the potential of valuable 'searchers' remains untapped.

"The year 2022 also marked a major advance in the field of AI and large language models. Tools such as ChatGPT have fundamentally changed the way users search, ask questions and generally interact with technology.

"This is naturally reflected in the area of on-site search in e-commerce. Search terms are becoming longer, more complex and more dialog-oriented. A good search & discovery engine needs to take this into account, which is what we do with Algolia Neural Search."

Which example of best practice in composable commerce has caught your attention?

"In my opinion, the most successful projects in the field of composable commerce are those that are supported by a broad group of stakeholders.

I find it particularly impressive when different teams can pursue their tasks and passions through the use of best-of-breed technologies.

"This allows developers to focus on innovation again, while digital merchandisers and e-commerce managers can spend their time designing, implementing and measuring the performance of campaigns, instead of fixing problems.

"One outstanding project that follows this approach and in which the internal teams took center stage is that of Flaconi."

What advice would you give to companies that want to implement a composable commerce approach?

"Only an entire technology landscape can be composable, never a single tool. Therefore, a composable commerce approach should always be an incremental process rather than a 'big bang project'.

"Such a complex transformation can hardly be summarized in a single piece of advice.

"However, what often strikes me is the weighting of the different components of a composable architecture. It's easy to get lost in the technical functionality of the tools. However, you should never lose sight of the 'business value', and prioritize accordingly.

"In concrete terms, this means: which pain points do I address with a particular tool? Which component has an effect on my bottom line? What is the ROI and time-to-value of an individual tool?"

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On February 21, 2024, a new episode of our video series Digital Synergy Session with Maximilian Schunk from Algolia will be released.