Do you remember “Ask Jeeves”? Way back in 1996, the search engine encouraged users to phrase their queries in the form of a question. The concept was ahead of its time. Twenty years, in fact. It wasn’t until 2015 that Google launched its truly conversational updates to enable conversational searching, allowing users to get more relevant results when using natural language.

Fast forward to today, and we have an abundance of information available to us and almost infinite choice. Shoppers have realised that being more specific in how they search can get them relevant results more quickly and this behaviour is influencing not only web discovery, but ecommerce discovery. In fact, according to Google, mobile searches including qualifiers like “me” and “I” have grown over 60% in two years, signifying another shift toward a penchant for personalised results

Truly innovative product discovery technology has been the privilege of tech giants such as Amazon and Google for too long. Retailers spend so much money getting shoppers to their websites, only to hemorrhage much of that investment by offering a suboptimal shopping experience. The research in our Ecommerce Discovery Index confirms that a majority of websites are not prepared for the next phase of conversational commerce.

This UK edition covers 50 retailers, 40 criteria, and one mission to simplify product discovery for shoppers (and retailers).