Retail

You already know that Shopify is a robust and flexible enterprise e-commerce platform. Add AI search and merchandising, and your customer experience goes from one-size-fits-all to one-in-a-million. Give shoppers what they want: fast, intuitive search, tailored results, and a personalized, conve...

Delight your customers with hyper-personalized, omnichannel, and localized content at scale with Contentstack EDGE—an AI-powered digital experience platform (DXP) fueled by customer data. Cut time-to-market in half with Grid Dynamics, the engineering force driving rapid deployment and seamless...

The buzzword “composable commerce” has dominated digital strategy conversations since Gartner popularized the term in 2020. But behind the marketing hype lies a longstanding, proven practice of integrating specialized, best-of-breed technology components into a flexible and scalable ecosystem....

2025’s tariff shakeup is here, and it’s rewriting the rules for e-commerce. With sweeping U.S. and North American reforms—like a new 10% baseline import duty, the end of the $800 de minimis exemption for shipments from Hong Kong and China (all imports from these regions now face steep tariffs of 12...

AI for retail starts with composable commerce—where every click feels personal, every journey is seamless, and every interaction counts. Grid Dynamics’ composable commerce platform blends MACH architecture with advanced AI to craft shopping experiences that sense, adapt, and respond in real time....

The Grid Dynamics Pre-composed Commerce Starter Kit for Google Cloud is an AI-powered eCommerce platform representing a strategic solution for retailers facing the dual challenges of delivering exceptional customer experiences while reducing order fulfillment costs. This MACH-based (Microservic...

Elevate your customer service with the AI-powered Customer Engagement Suite from Grid Dynamics and Google Cloud. This comprehensive solution combines Google's advanced agentic AI capabilities with Grid Dynamics' proprietary accelerators to deliver personalized self-service, real-time agent assistan...

This retail AI trifecta combines Grid Dynamics' expertise with Google Cloud's advanced technologies to modernize retail experiences. This powerful solution integrates AI search and smart merchandising on a pre-composed commerce foundation to deliver seamless, personalized shopping journeys. By l...

As consumerism inevitably evolves, retailers must find new ways to understand their customers and refine their digital and in-store experiences. At the heart of this change is an AI-powered eCommerce platform with AI search, enriched product catalogs, and precision merchandising—key elements th...

Download the full case study now to explore how this tools distributor reimagined their automotive ecommerce experience for future success. By downloading, you'll gain access to exclusive insights that can help inform your own digital transformation strategies. Whether you're in the automotive i...

For many businesses, moving away from familiar but inherently unadaptable legacy suites is challenging. However, eliminating this technical debt one step at a time can bolster your confidence. The best starting point is transitioning from a monolithic CMS to a headless CMS. This shift to a modern c...

Grid Dynamics' GenAI Content and Catalog Optimization transforms catalog management using generative AI to enhance product information, improve search, and streamline content creation. As Google Cloud's launch partner, Grid Dynamics brings 18 years of e-commerce expertise and 8 years of enterprise...

Grid Dynamics and Google Cloud have partnered to deliver a transformative search solution combining Google's Vertex AI Search for Commerce with Grid Dynamics' 14 years of search expertise and proprietary Merchandising Experience Platform (MXP) accelerator. The solution delivers impressive result...

Grid Dynamics' Pre-composed Commerce Platform for Google Cloud offers a streamlined solution for implementing composable commerce architecture. Developed with commercetools, this starter kit accelerates digital commerce implementation by up to 40% while reducing the complexity of composable systems...

As a retail leader, are you in complete control of your search, browse, and recommendation strategies? Do your digital experiences align with your business goals while delivering what customers expect? Can you control product rankings to highlight specific items in search results, adjust categories...

Discover how Contentstack, commercetools, Google Vertex AI, and Grid Dynamics accelerate e-commerce innovation through the integration of generative AI and composable commerce.

The headless CMS market is experiencing unprecedented growth as organizations recognize its potential for delivering flexible, personalized digital experiences. Recent market analysis reveals striking momentum—the global headless CMS software market, valued at $851.48 million in 2024, is projected...

Discover the top digital customer experience trends to shape 2025. Explore AI, personalization, and CX strategies in this free ebook.

In today's fast-paced and data-driven world, accurately predicting demand is more critical than ever for businesses aiming to stay competitive. Traditional forecasting methods often provide a single-point estimate, which can be useful but falls short in accounting for the inherent uncertainties and...

Discover how Google conversational search powered by catalog optimization, smart matching, and conversion-focused ranking enhances product discovery and drives purchase decisions.

Grid Dynamics won the 2024 Contentstack Experience Award for Most Innovative Project by empowering this global sports brand to rapidly deliver personalized digital experiences. When a leading sporting goods retailer with a global footprint faced challenges with its outdated content managemen...

Digital commerce has undergone a seismic shift over the past few years. In the blink of an eye, over 2 billion global digital buyers were flooding the internet, and projections indicate that 95% of all purchases will be made online through digital channels by 2040. With this, the number of online s...

Have you come across a retail marketing message lately that states, 'Bring the fitting room home and find what you love'? Many retail brands today showcase their customer-first mindset through 'try before you buy' experiences, allowing customers to order products online, try everything, and return...

In 2022, Clarks, the iconic 200-year-old footwear brand, faced a critical digital crossroads. With massive global sales and an outdated e-commerce platform, Clarks partnered with Grid Dynamics to architect and launch an all-new Clarks.com. This case study reveals how they transformed from a legacy...

Discover how the Contentstack, Constructor, and Grid Dynamics partnership can transform your customer acquisition strategy with an expertly integrated search and content approach.

Explore the top 6 technology trends in e-commerce that blur the line between physical and digital experiences using a MACH-based flexible business model, AI-powered personalization, and unified customer data. Download this e-book to uncover how each trend promises tailored shopping journeys for ever...

Discover how we've reshaped tire recognition technology through advanced AI methodologies, leveraging deep learning visual models and seamless integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In collaboration with a prominent automotive industry leader, we've addressed the critical need for precise tire...

Demand forecasting is a crucial aspect of retail supply chain management that involves predicting future customer demand to make informed decisions about inventory levels, production, and resource allocation. It is a statistical analysis that considers numerous variables to optimize the predict...

E-commerce has undergone a profound transformation in recent years, driven by soaring customer expectations. Shoppers now demand seamless omnichannel experiences, lightning-fast site speeds, and rapid innovation to meet evolving market demands. However, traditional monolithic architectures struggle...

Explore the technical prowess of conversational AI in e-commerce, from intricate customer service and business intelligence solutions to personalized shopping experiences. Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technolog...

SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris) has been a widely adopted commerce platform for over a decade. Throughout the 2010s, it was consistently rated as a leading solution in the market, providing retailers with a solid platform for efficient e-commerce operations. However, the digital commerce e...

In the ever-growing world of e-commerce, providing customers with an efficient and relevant product ranking experience is crucial for driving sales and maintaining customer satisfaction. Online retailers invest significant resources into optimizing their search and recommendation systems to ensure...

Booking online travel is not easy, unless it's on the best apps. But what makes their UX so good? We take a closer look.

Lessons in the perils and pitfalls to avoid—and the opportunities to seize—in the course of your app...

Embark on a transformative exploration into the realm of advanced product discovery, where artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision converge to redefine the way users interact with digital commerce platforms. Our latest case study delves into the revolutionary strategie...

In the dynamic realm of supply chain and inventory management, where decisions shape the balance between profit and loss, inventory distribution stands out as a key driver of revenue growth. This white paper explores the strategic significance of optimizing inventory allocation, emphasizing its tra...

AI-powered e-commerce is taking center stage as more and more retail brands utilize next-gen solutions to delight customers and gain competitive advantages. Pairing human creativity with modern tech capabilities not only optimizes operational efficiency but also crafts a dynamic, anticipa...

In the rapidly-evolving digital landscape, the performance of an application can dramatically influence a company's success. Users expect fast, efficient, and smooth experiences, and failing to meet these expectations can result in losing customers to competitors. ❔But what does it really...

Customer retention is critical for retailers and CPG companies today because brand loyalty is a fickle thing in the digital age. However, to effectively prevent customer churn, a few fundamental questions need to be answered: Who will churn? You need to identify the specific user segment that y...

Envision yourself as a store owner looking to boost foot traffic. You hatch a plan: stand at the front and actively promote your items to those walking by. With enthusiasm, you wear a striking outfit and hold up a blank board, ready to publicize a special deal. However, when it’s time to pen the...

The Grid Dynamics' UX/UI team undertook a comprehensive redesign of a client's web and mobile apps, recognizing the pivotal role of digital customer experience in boosting revenue and conversions for consumer-facing businesses. Following a design thinking approach, the team's tasks included definin...

While composable commerce unlocks a flexible and scalable technology ecosystem to build digital solutions that meet unique business needs, the biggest differentiator among different composable ecosystems is how various packaged business capabilities (PBCs) are seamlessly integrated to ensure harm...

For many years, e-commerce applications have been built from custom development services, leveraging great open-source frameworks and tools. However, making all these components work together as one ecosystem—from technical aspects to managing teams and aligning their milestones—is no easy feat.W...

In the dynamic world of digital commerce, the landscape has transformed dramatically over the past two decades. From monolithic systems that offered comprehensive solutions but lacked adaptability, to the rise of microservices and headless architectures, businesses have sought more flexible and cus...

Composable commerce has emerged as a transformative approach to e-commerce that offers unprecedented flexibility and scalability to businesses. Where traditional monolithic suites burden organizations with unused features and an inflexible software ecosystem, composable commerce unlocks a ‘best-f...

The demand for online marketing solutions and omnichannel experiences has led to an explosion of digital information. As a result, the necessity for content management tools has significantly surged. At the same time, the online landscape for content management is fiercely competitive, making it...

Our offerings combine strong domain expertise, world-class engineering capabilities...

It should come as no surprise that Generative AI is the #1 tech trend in 2023, but it certainly isn't the only one. Building a foundational composable commerce ecosystem of best-in-class tools to support and personalize customer buying journeys should remain top-of-mind for retailers and brands who...

The world of AI is constantly evolving, and recent advances in text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have been truly groundbreaking. These models are already transforming how artists and designers work, enabling them to experiment with their ideas and create stun...

Traditional product design can be a complex and challenging process, requiring multiple stages of ideation, modification, restyling, 3D modeling, prototyping, and testing. One of the main challenges is finding the balance between creative freedom and practical constraints, such as cost, manufactura...

When our team embarked on the project to redesign the interface of a critical reporting tool for one of the world’s largest athletic apparel companies, we knew we had a big challenge ahead of us. Not only did we need to extend the interface toolkit, but we also had to ensure that the new design wou...

It's time to strategically amplify your impact in the ever-evolving landscape of generative AI...

Traditional monolithic e-commerce platforms lack the flexibility or scalability required to meet the evolving needs of modern consumers. Digital commerce modernization can help with these issues by identifying and prioritizing business functionality for migration to microservices.

Composable commerce is a game-changing concept that elevates online shopping to new heights. It represents a shift away from a platform-centric perspective to a customer-centric approach, emphasizing the importance of delivering a superior experience to the end user. There are a number of e...

As businesses grow and expand in the increasingly digital on-demand economy, managing inventory has become a far more convoluted process. For example, many retail and manufacturing companies have to deal with complex environments with multiple sourcing locations, including regio...

Generative AI has gained immense interest thanks to the unprecedented success of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that most of the world has come to love, built by OpenAI. In fact, ChatGPT has become the world's fastest-growing consumer application in history, gaining 100 million users in just 2 months afte...

Inventory optimization encompasses the process of determining the optimal level of inventory to hold that balances the cost of holding the inventory with the cost of inventory stockouts. Holding too much inventory can lead to increased storage costs, spoilage, and poor turnover metrics. On the...

The telecom industry has faced numerous challenges in recent years, including waning revenues and return on invested capital (ROIC), as well as difficulty keeping up with post-pandemic customer demands. It would be expected that, by now, telecom operators would have adopted AI-powered solutions to...

In today’s consumer-driven digital economy, personalized customer experiences in the Telecom sector are no longer a “nice-to-have”. They have become a fundamental component of digital commerce strategies across industries. Why? Because the number of channels consumers use to interact with brands th...

Recent years are marked by dramatic changes in the Telecommunications business environment, driven by the pandemic, economic turbulence, and political instability. As Forrester put it, “Constant consumer change is a defining element of the “new normal.” Consumers changed their shopping habits, thei...

In today’s consumer-driven digital economy, personalized customer experiences in the B2B commerce sector are no longer a “nice-to-have”. They have become a fundamental component of digital commerce strategies across industries. Why? Because the number of channels consumers use to interact with bran...

If the chaos and uncertainty of the past few years has taught supply chain leaders in the grocery retail chain sector anything, it’s that leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics in the cloud can help them to maintain a competitive advantage in the global m...

Hyper-personalization has emerged as a key driver of customer engagement in the digital age, and in 2023, hyper-personalization technologies and strategies are expected to surge. By leveraging the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, companies can now create highly c...

We built an Augmented-Reality-powered space and product measurement application for a leading specialty retailer in the storage and space organization market. By offering the AR functionality in the client's mobile app, consumers save significant time and effort by being able to measure, coordinate...

A virtual world where we live, work, shop, and interact with others may have sounded like science fiction a few short years ago, but it’s fast becoming a tangible reality. This virtual world is called the Metaverse: a digital ecosystem made up of decentralized, user-generated platforms that provide...

With tens or even hundreds of thousands of options at their fingertips, shoppers are switching brands at unprecedented rates. While traditional values like price (30%), quality (16%), and delivery costs (15%) are still significant decision-making factors, a report by McKinsey shows that availabil...

Exceptional customer experience is critical for retailers in the post-pandemic digital age, but monolithic e-commerce systems simply don’t have the advanced capabilities, scalability or flexibility needed to meet the rapidly changing demands of today’s digital consumers. With composable commerce an...

Keeping up with consumer demand for personalized experiences across multiple channels is paramount to digital commerce brands. Conventional monolithic applications can no longer solve this challenge. Today it takes a modular architecture approach known as MACH to enable fast, easy change management...

While traditional values like price, quality, and delivery costs still matter in the digital commerce world, it’s the search experience that has now become the strongest driver of new purchases. With hundreds of thousands of options at their fingertips, shoppers expect to find what they are looking...

For retailers, it’s no secret that a critical component of a commercial website is a delightful and compelling user experience. If customers can’t find your website though, the value of that user experience goes out the window. Recognizing the combined value of user experience and SEO, this global...

A company’s ability to generate a steady flow of new customers, and retain existing customers at the same time, can decisively determine whether a business is successful or not. Customer retention is particularly important because the cost of user acquisition is much higher than the cost of user re...

Shimano, a $5B bicycle components, fishing tackle and rowing equipment company, engaged us to improve the overall performance of their EU B2B platform. We conducted an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and SAPShimano, a $5B bicycle components, fishing tackle, and rowing equipment company, sought to e...

Looking to take customer engagement to the next level, the client requested a mobile application that could run on the iOS platform, and be expanded on the Android version later, for a specific group of customers, providing a personalized and unique customer experience. To create the best possib...

If you’re not thinking about the business impact of the metaverse yet, it’s high time to wake up and e-smell the digital coffee. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour per day working, shopping, studying, or using social media in the metaverse. Tech giants like Fa...

Originally published by Total Retail E-commerce has come a long way since companies like Amazon.com and eBay first launched their online businesses. While pre-pandemic online transactions only amounted to 13.8 percent of global retail sales, consumers quickly shifted to online shopping when the...

This case demonstrates how the shopping cart and checkout functionality of an on-premise, legacy, monolithic eCommerce platform was modernized to a cloud-based serverless solution. The customer, an American chain of luxury department stores, required modernized e-commerce capabilities in the...

Whether it’s pandemic, war, or climate change, there have been and will continue to be crises that impact the smooth running of supply chain and inventory management processes for businesses across industries. To mitigate risk, streamline processes, and prepare for the future, leading Grid Dynamics...

Consumers today increasingly value memorable experiences over products themselves. Leading organizations are turning to cloud-native platforms and advanced analytics to create unified customer 360 solutions, enabling seamless, personalized digital engagement across every channel and touchpoint. By...

In today’s digital age, visually appealing web applications are not enough to please customers. Providing compelling customer experiences through fast, easy-to-use web applications is a critical component of any competitive business strategy today. Deliver a downright delightful user experience, ra...

We share our experience of migrating a monolith app to micro frontends using webpack module federation What does a web application usually look like? Most often it is a monolith with a single code base where the whole team merges the code, and a single pipeline where everything is deployed at...

For retailers, eCommerce leaders, and data scientists looking to boost customer engagement, product discovery, and revenue per visitor, this white paper offers a hands-on, technically guided approach to building an effective personalization engine. The guide explains how to bridge the gap betwe...

Knowde, a leading digital marketplace for ingredients, polymers and chemistry, was looking to provide more relevant, timely, and personalized search experiences for their customers. Following a MACH approach to composable commerce, we implemented a powerful new search system that supports: mul...

Unique shopping experience portal to optimize personal assistant interactions for select customers, designed and implemented as a greenfield AWS-native solution. Our client is an American chain of luxury department stores focusing on high-end curated products and excellent customer servi...

In our new and increasingly all-digital reality we see immersive technologies like AI, ML, AR and VR trending, all with the goal of engaging modern consumers in commerce anywhere and everywhere with deeply personalized, convenient and relevant experiences. How are luxury retailers achieving thes...

The stakes have never been higher for the luxury retail industry to meet consumer demand for personalized digital experiences across multiple channels, including taking a deep dive into new fields of augmented reality and virtual reality. We have already seen a major shift to digital as a response...

Ecommerce software has come a long way and achieved remarkable progress, turning from relatively simple applications into complex platforms rich in features and functionality. Back in the days when Amazon and eBay started their first online businesses, monolith architecture was virtually the only o...

Consumer demand for personalized digital shopping experiences has skyrocketed over the last few years, and constant change is to be expected. Add to this the fact that every retail environment is unique, with specific product catalogs and exclusive customer experience needs. One of the most crucial...

In modern life it is almost impossible to imagine a day without a mobile phone. We use them all the time, carry them around everywhere we go, and store very personal information on them, to the point where they become more than just a phone and more than just a gadget. With the technological adva...

Recent years are marked with dramatic change in the business environment driven by the pandemic, economic turbulence and political instability. As Forrester put it, “Constant consumer change is a defining element of the “new normal.” Consumers change their shopping habits, their brand loyalty is sh...

All the buzz in 2022 is about digital customer experience. Forget about digital transformation - we’ve been there, done that and got the t-shirt! Now is the time to focus on your customers’ needs, wants and wishes, and transform the ways in which you can deliver on them across all your channels....

We live in a multicultural society with more than 7 000 languages spoken across the world today. To better serve the needs and preferences of global consumers, retailers need to understand the unique nuances and characteristics of the diverse languages their customers speak. It is no longer enoug...

In the modern world, advanced recognition technologies play an increasingly important role in various areas of human life. Recognizing the characteristics of vehicle tires is one such area where deep learning is making a valuable difference. How? Read on to find out. Solving the problem of r...

In today’s highly digitized world, business models need to change to keep up with consumer demands. With the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are having to reimagine their business models entirely, and they’ve had to do it at a massively accelerated pace. The manufacturing industry is n...

Customers nowadays are seeking a holistic experience across channels when it comes to retail. Despite the increased popularity of online shopping, many still prefer an in-store experience. For example, one study shows that 70% of UK consumers over the age of 45 still prefer human interaction over s...

Customer loyalty has always been a top priority for retailers. And the digital transformation trend hasn’t changed that fact. Instead, what digital transformation has done is expand the playing field. It has enabled a vastly increased number of customer touchpoints, the creation of a 360 view of ea...

In an era where customer experience and product discovery innovations are a top priority for businesses, we are witnessing a shift from traditional recommendation systems towards session-based recommendation systems in the digital commerce sector. Why? Because they produce personalized recommendati...

In an era where customer experience and product discovery innovations are a top priority for businesses, we are witnessing a shift from traditional recommendation systems towards session-based recommendation systems in the digital commerce sector. Read this case study to see how we designed and...

In this white paper, we’ll outline the evolution of omnichannel digital commerce and the 2022 trends shaping its future. You too can curate exceptional customer experiences using cutting-edge digital commerce technology - from composable commerce platforms and AI-powered product discovery to AR, VR...

Visual search is changing the product discovery game for retailers in the accelerated digital playing field. Replacements.com, the world’s largest retailer of tableware, drinkware, silver-flatware and estate jewelry entered the game with a bang! With a catalog of over 11 million products, many with...

Even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, the online shopping craze is not slowing down. Thanks to ongoing pandemic precautions, a rapidly increasing number of people are turning to digital commerce platforms to shop for everything from daily groceries to clothes, shoes, gadgets, gif...

In today’s data-driven digital economy, businesses collect an abundance of data to inform and optimize their processes and strategies. An emerging trend in data collection is to analyze road traffic data, including vehicle detection and tracking, mobility patterns, traffic volume, road network perf...

The manufacturing industry is under immense pressure to adopt cutting-edge technology solutions in order to remain competitive in an increasingly digital and on-demand economy. You have to be faster, smarter and more agile to meet customer and industry demands, and process efficiency is fundamental...

As the world undergoes the digital transformations, accelerated by the global pandemics, omnichannel shopping experience becomes a new norm. Ship from Store turns out to be an important step on the path of establishing effective and convenient retail practice. But the transformation bri...

In a previous article, we reviewed the main attributes of loyalty programs including customer profiles, points systems, and rewards types. We looked at what types of business inputs are required to design a loyalty program and which business rules and strategies need to be clearly defined. In this...

Do you feel well-equipped when it comes to data-driven personalization? A recent McKinsey survey of data leaders found that only 15% believe their company is on the right track with personalization. Read this whitepaper to explore the new generation of Customer Analytics and Personalization sol...

Semantic query parsing, described in “Semantic query parsing blueprint”, is a powerful technique to improve relevance of the search results. It has proven especially successful when a search solution deals with semi-structured data, such as ecommerce product catalog, customer profiles or real estat...

Providing each customer with personalized treatment that helps improve long-term engagement is one of the most fundamental problems in marketing communications. This task is particularly important for businesses that rely heavily on long-term customer relationships, including telecom, video games,...

Meet Lucy, a nice young lady and enthusiastic fashion shopper. Spring is in the air and Lucy just passed by somebody wearing this truly amazing dress. She positively needs to get something like this, right now. Easy! Lucy opens her favorite clothing store’s website, taps the search bar and type...

In a previous article, we reviewed the way that loyalty programs can help businesses improve sales, increase profits, establish long-term relationships with customers, and encourage them to become advocates for your brand. To achieve these goals, modern loyalty programs are increasing in complexity...

Ever tried to stretch your imagination and picture how your bedroom would look like with that new lovely wallpaper? What about new tiles for a bathroom? Sounds like a tedious task, especially as you go through dozens of design options, combine and compare them. Well, no more! Modern augmented reali...

The modern world is rapidly changing every day, bringing new levels of complexity and new challenges. This means both customers and retailers are continually making adjustments to their behaviors to meet changing desires, expectations, and environments. At the same time, the market has never b...

Customer retention is the primary pillar for building virtually any subscription-based business, including software, video game, media, and telecom businesses. Nowadays, it is common to use advanced machine learning techniques to predict customer churn probability as accurately as possible. However...

The coin recognition system is a great showcase of the power of modern deep learning image processing models. While coins themselves are relatively simple objects, many coins look very similar and it is surprisingly challenging to build a system that can reliably identify a particular coin. That is...

Allowing any element of a digital product to fail can have significant implications. Functional failures have tangible consequences for conversion rates, which ultimately impact the entire business. Difficulties with browsing web sites affect user impressions of the brand meaning they may very we...

NLP technologies are rapidly improving, changing our user experience, and increasing the efficiency of working with text data. For instance, web search and language translation innovations changed our world, and now Deep Learning enters more and more areas. While writing these sentences, the editor...

These days, when machine learning-based result ranking becomes a de-facto standard for e-commerce search implementations, it still relies on the high quality of the matching. No matter how sophisticated your ML ranking algorithm is, if relevant products are not retrieved from the search index, it w...

Machine learning is an essential part of the modern search system. ML models are helping in many areas of search workflow, such as intent classifications, query parsing, facet selection, and, most importantly, results re-ranking. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of expanding the...

According to Hedges & Co. report, US online sales of auto parts and accessories amounted to $12B and, while new car sales projection are looking bleak, the future of the automotive aftermarket is quite positive. Both specialized auto parts retailers and online commerce powerhouses like Amazon...

This report is based on a survey of marketing, merchandising, and pricing directors and executives and aims to assess their priorities, challenges, and plans with regard to decision automation in the area of revenue management. The main topics of this study include the following: What are the...

Evolving beyond a mere tech advantage, artificial intelligence (AI) has gone a long way to cement itself as a mainstay of modern-day retail. In other words, AI solutions are a competitive necessity for retail. Designed to assist business and technology executives in understanding and deploying AI e...

In this white paper, we provide practical recommendations to technology and business leaders on how advanced data analytics and engineering capabilities can be leveraged to rapidly and efficiently respond to the COVID-19 disruption. These recommendations are largely based on early examples of respo...

In the  previous article we discussed the Endeca rules model and explained how to re-implement this model using Elasticsearch. We needed to implement inverted search to trigger our rules and we leveraged powerful percolator feature in Elasticsearch which greatly simplified our implementation...

The COVID-19 crisis is clearly the biggest economic disruption the world has seen in the 21st century. This disruption impacts virtually all industries and all areas of enterprise operations through market demand, supply chain, and human capital. The adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and p...

Personalization and recommendation algorithms have been around for many decades, and basic methods such as look-alike modeling and collaborative filtering are widely understood and adopted across the industry. The advancement of deep learning greatly expands the toolkit available to developers of p...

Search engines have been with us for several decades already, and we are using them daily in our digital lives, so why are we still talking about search? Isn’t search a solved problem already? Search probably would have been a long solved problem if human language were a well-defined, thought-th...

Replacements, Ltd. is the world's largest retailer of tableware, silver, estate jewelry and watches, including patterns being produced by manufacturers as well as those discontinued. Customers looking to expand their collections, along with those who have misplaced or broken pieces, use the compa...

For almost all industries the digital experience has become a primary importance. And ongoing rapid technology advancements mean that many companies need to reconsider the technology choices around their Content Management System (CMS). CMSs have changed a lot in the last ten years and are now fa...

Online retailers operating large catalogs are always looking to improve the quality of their product discovery functionality. Keyword search and category browse experience powered by their search engine is a first stage of sales funnel where fast and relevant search results can produce delightful a...

Faceted navigation, a.k.a. guided navigation is a de-facto standard user experience for any serious online retailer. Facets seamlessly introduce your customers to the structure and attributes of an online catalog and provide shoppers with powerful tools to slice and dice their results with useful f...

Online retailers are always looking for ways to provide delightful and frictionless shopping experience to their customers. Product discovery, powered by search and category browsing, stays at the top of the sales funnel and has the highest impact in converting visitors to customers.  At the...

Merchandising is an essential part of modern online retail. Automated merchandising platforms allow business users to control search and browse results by affecting product ranking decisions, providing curated content and referring customers to relevant categories or thematic landing pages. Or...

Initially, digital transformation for brick-and-mortar retailers meant creating a good customer experience over web and mobile channels. While that started to close the retail chasm that Amazon had opened beneath traditional retailers, it wasn’t as if they could abandon their stores and go all-digi...

Since the dawn of ecommerce in the end of the nineties, online retailers have coined a famous “If they can’t find ‘em, they can’t buy ‘em” motto, which stands today as fresh as ever. Online shoppers have a lot of choices, and their patience is getting ever shorter: they expect instant, precise, rel...

If you want your customers to have a seamless shopping experience no matter where they are or what device they’re using, but you’re stuck with a black box legacy system like Oracle ATG, you may think a true omnichannel experience is beyond your reach. We have helped many of the top retailers in...

Deep-learning powered natural language processing is growing by leaps and bounds. During the past year, latest NLP models exceeded the human performance baseline in some specific language understanding tasks. Source: Facebook AI State-of-the-art NLP models allow AI-enabled systems to repr...

The capabilities of speech recognition and natural language processing are rapidly increasing and now allow people to regularly engage with AI programs in human-like conversations. This opens the doors for an entirely new generation of smart devices and use cases. One of the most promising is voice...

Computer vision has become essential to remaining competitive in the digital retail space because it offers innovative customer experiences and process automation that delights customers and cut costs. Customers demand the convenience of features such as visual search or automated question ans...

Are only 20% of your product catalog recommendations behavior driven? Product recommendations have become an essential sales tool for e-commerce sites. These recommendation systems typically use collaborative filtering, a common approach for building behavior-based recommendation engines u...

Replacements, Ltd. is the world's largest retailer of tableware, silver and estate jewelry, including patterns still available from manufacturers as well as those discontinued. Customers looking to expand their collections, along with those who have misplaced or broken pieces, use replacements.com’...

“It takes months to find a customer, but only seconds to lose one.” Maintaining a high-quality customer service experience while minimizing costs is high on the list of any e-Commerce enterprise. An AI-based question-answering system can do just that. But how would one approach building such a...

Your product is good. Your mobile app has great features, but your app store rating is low. What happened? In a previous blog post we demonstrated that high crash rates can cause low app ratings. In this blog, we explain how we analyzed negative reviews to determine what motivated customers to...

These days, every retailer has to be mobile-friendly to be competitive, but our client was ahead of the curve. They wanted to provide their largely teenage customer base, who prefer to use mobile devices, with a truly awesome mobile experience. They realized that in order to make this leap into t...

Marketers usually use multiple channels–such as sponsored search, display ads, and emails–to reach their customers, and each channel usually includes multiple activities or has multiple parameters that are associated with various costs. For example, a marketer can run several email campaigns, each...

The e-Commerce Director for one of our client’s was concerned that reorder rates with customers were at an industry low. The root cause analysis pointed to the performance of their search order history function, which was so slow that customers couldn't find past order and quit in frustration. They...

Cool AR apps were possible before, but now they have become increasingly sophisticated, thanks to new features in Google's ARCore and Sceneform. Objects can now be placed on vertical planes such as walls or doors. 3D images render faster and more easily, and augmented reality scenes can be shared...

A global retail company faced the challenge of bringing their inventory management system to the cloud. The company required their new cloud-based solution to include online and store inventory in all geographical regions, and deliver a fast and consistent database performance within each region. T...

“Find all customers who have a birthday in the next 10 days” “Which employees have achieved 10 years of service this month?” These types of questions are simple for a human to answer with the aid of a calendar, but it is much more difficult for a computer to answer them on its own. Calendars...

Smart autocomplete is an essential feature for improving online catalog navigation and boosting product discovery for users. This is especially true for mobile search, where the smaller screen and keyboard, limit the use of more traditional faceted search selectors. Smart autocomplete, also known...

Speed of delivery is one of the key success factors in online retail. Retailers fiercely compete with each other in this space, implementing new order fulfillment options such as Same-Day Shipping, Buy Online Pick Up in Store (BOPUS) and Ship from Store (SFS). These capabilities help to both improv...

In the middle of your home improvement project, you realize that you've lost a very important screw. You have the matching screw that you need in your hands, and simply need to make another trip to the hardware store. However, a trip to the local hardware store is a hassle, as many of the screws lo...

Pricing is one of the key factors that drives a successful retail business model, and it is also one of the most difficult to manage. Retailers made lots of improvements on their pricing strategies over the last decade, moving from cost plus or value pricing to modern day AI-driven price management...

A modern merchandising system can provide a guided product discovery experience to shoppers, which is essential for retailers with large online catalogs. These systems and tools allow merchandisers to improve product listing relevancy by controlling product matching and ranking when a shopper see...

“Life is better with art” is the motto of Art.com, a leading global online retailer selling high quality art reproductions. Their site lives up to the motto, as they possess the world's largest collection of art, with a meticulously curated catalog of images, featuring state of the art printi...

The convergence of in-store and online retail operations in recent years has put significant new demands on the management of pricing, offers, and promotions as compared to pre-omnichannel times. The outdated, simplistic approaches to determine the price of products and promotional offerings are st...

Let’s face it — Oracle Endeca is an out-of-date e-commerce search technology solution. Endeca’s lack of personalization and support for omnichannel capabilities have been common problems for many large retailers, and the issues were not getting solved by ATG. We at Grid Dynamics have seen this fi...

After an hour of online research, Rachel bought the perfect raincoat for her upcoming trip in Southeast Asia – and then discovered that it didn't exist. Unfortunately, when she tried to add it to her cart, she was informed that the raincoat was actually out of stock, and could not be purchased. Thi...

Nearly all major online retailers these days support faceted navigation, as it is a key instrument of product discovery. Facets provide a powerful, intuitive way to summarize search results from multiple perspectives. They also offer a straightforward interface to apply filters and refine navigat...

Retail is on the brink of yet another technological breakthrough. AI devices like Siri, Alexa, Google Home, and virtual assistants of all kinds are rapidly becoming trusted and dependable aides to many people. Technology companies led by Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are rushing to grab th...

With an online catalog of over 1M SKUs and a multi-billion dollar e-commerce store, things were going well for the online retailer. However, their search engine’s relevancy was not ideal, hurting their shoppers’ ability to discover the right products and lowering conversion rates. The core pro...

Blockchain technology essentially emerged with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. But it is now known that blockchain offers numerous other innovative technical and business use applications beyond what was imagined by the creators of the world’s first cryptocurrency. While Bitcoin had a fairly d...

Mr and Mrs. Smith are a regular middle-class couple in the process of remodeling and redecorating their home. After a long and tireless search on Pinterest and other lifestyle websites, they finally found a concept for their new interior decoration plans. The only issue was that actually finding an...

As augmented reality technology continues to advance, it opens up possibilities for a dazzling array of practical and innovative applications. One great example is a “Magic Mirror”. An augmented reality Magic Mirror is a reflective TV screen linked to a camera and controlled by augmented reality so...

A customer of ours, one of the largest omni-channel retailers in the US, was having issues with product discovery. Their e-commerce site had a massive catalog with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, a modern e-commerce backend and a powerful search engine, yet the conversion was less than stellar. Fr...

The Solr suggester component allows you to vastly improve your search capabilities and experience. It provides users with automatic suggestions for query terms, and can be used to implement useful auto-suggest featurest in your search application.  … Strengthen Shopify with A...

Augmented Reality (AR) is a type of computer vision technology that allows real-time views to be overlaid with virtual, computer generated objects. As opposed to virtual reality, which replaces the real world with a completely simulated one, augmented reality is designed to enhance people’s perce...

The retail industry is embracing big data, analytics, and machine learning (ML) to improve customer engagement, optimize operations, and drive sales. Increasingly, we’re seeing business intelligence systems that were once based on historic data, offline modeling, and traditional reporting being r...

If you are an enterprise omni-channel retailer with a significant and growing online presence, it is likely that Oracle ATG has been your platform of choice for many years. You have probably invested thousands of hours and tens of millions of dollars in the customization, integration and tuning of...

Open source full-text search engines provide rich functionality out of the box. However, there are some use cases when naive implementation may lead to terrible customer experience. We faced one of such use cases when we worked with a patent management company.  Part of a patent officer's...

In our previous post, we discussed the impact of product misattribution in e-commerce and how image recognition with Machine Learning can be an important tool to resolve this issue. In this post, we will get into the details of how to detect and correct misattribution using Machine Learning, Goog...

A richly attributed and well-curated product catalog is the key asset of online retailers. However, products are frequently misattributed, which makes it a pain for customers to find the products they’re looking for. Catalog product attribution issues are a major pain point in e-commerce. They...

In recent years, autocomplete has become a staple feature for searches of all types.Whether Google, Amazon, or smaller sites and vendors, predictive typing, as it’s otherwise known, (also sometimes called auto-suggest, search-as-you-type or type-ahead) has become an expected part of an engagin...

For many years, chatbots have been quietly moving from the screens of sci-fi movies to commercial applications. Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, along with an ever-increasing array of AI startups, have been gradually perfecting Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) that a...

In online commerce, catalog navigation functionality is one of the key aspects of the overall user experience. Customers spend the majority of their time on the site discovering and selecting products and making purchase decisions. The mission of quality search and browse functionality is to prov...

I was recently on an airline flight with onboard entertainment. There was a good selection of movies, but look at the film navigation menu! It lacks the ability to nest different languages into a single movie item and facet selections based on the movie’s language. As a result, it wastes scre...

We’ve talked about searching nested parents and children with Solr Block Join. But we can go far beyond that, to searching siblings, grandchildren, and other descendants. This gives your customers more search options without forcing them to do a new search every time they add a search parameter....

The “law of unintended consequences” applies to using the block join query parser in Solr, just as it does to many other things in life (and software). Leave out certain query strings in Solr, and It seems to make no difference. … Strengthen Shopify with AI search that sellsRead More &ra...

SolrInputDocument has methods — getChildDocuments()and addChildDocument() — for nesting child documents into a parent document. XML and Javabin formats are now able to transfer them. JSON support is ongoing. Start by indexing a few t-shirts, as a sample product-SKU hierarchy us...

In a previous post, we talked about business motivations behind the support of structured documents in a Solr/Lucene index and the unique requirements for a  faceting engine which is created by this approach to modeling data. We have introduced SOLR-5743. Now it is time to take a deep di...

Join support is a highly-requested Solr feature, especially in e-commerce. So I repeated Erick Erickson’s benchmark test with block join support for Solr, and I want to share my observations on how BlockJoinQuery can maximize Solr/Lucene performance.  In this post and in the future,...