searching is: using a query to capture results. you can use boolean expressions to add constraints to your search. the problem is, sellers on secondhand e-commerce websites are not consistent in their listing title, descriptions, use of hard categories, and on e-commerce platforms ran by teenagers: knowledge. in order to see as much clothes as possible, you need to maximize how many listings you capture.
Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment
Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing behavior. We collaborate with one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China and study its roll out of a new search tool. When a customer searches for a general term (e.g., “headphones”), the tool suggests refined queries (e.g., “bluetooth headphones” or “noise-canceling headphones”) with the help of images and texts. The search tool was rolled out with a long-run experiment, which allows us to measure its short-run and long-run effects. We find that, although there was no immediate effect on orders or total expenditures, the search tool changed customers’ search and purchasing behavior in the long-run. Customers with access to the new tool eventually increased orders and expenditures compared to those in the control group, especially for non top-selling products. The purchase increase comes from more effective searches, rather than an increase in activity on the platform. We also find that the effect is not only driven by the direct value of suggested searches, but also by customers indirectly learning to perform more effective searches on their own.
How Targeting Affects Customer Search: A Field Experiment
It has become common practice for retailers to personalize direct marketing efforts based on customer transaction histories as a tactic to increase sales. Targeted email offers featuring products in the same category as a customer’s previous purchases generate higher purchase rates. However, a targeted offer emphasizing familiar products could result in curtailed search for unadvertised products, as a closely matched offer weakens a customer’s incentives to search beyond the targeted items. In a field experiment using email offers sent by an online wine retailer, targeted offers resulted in decreased search activity on the retailer’s website. This effect is driven by a lower rate of search by customers who visit the site, rather than a lower incidence of search. There are several ways this could potentially hurt retailers and consumers, such as reduced cross-selling and fewer opportunities for customers to explore new products. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
Search has its own bitter lesson
Human incentives to make content findable to your search matter more than technology
Information foraging
Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.
Internal Site Search Optimization: Best Practices for Your Site
A great internal site search can be a delightful user experience—and a wildly profitable optimization. Find out how to do it right.
Google further buries search results under AI mode
You might have to do way more scrolling to get to links.
AI is becoming a shopping channel: report
And 34% of shoppers now use the tech
Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping? | Affidavit | Sheila Heti
Am I still capable of looking slowly, as if coming in from the side? Or have I ruined myself? Can I now only buy?
Research Report 6: Agentic Shopping is Complicated and Contingent
This is the sixth in a series of short reports that help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rig
What’s the Difference Between Search and Recommendation?
It’s hard to draw the sort of clean line you’d want when designing regulation, say Luke Thorburn, Jonathan Stray, and Priyanjana Bengani.
A guide to the anatomy of effective commerce agents | Claude by Anthropic
The architecture, latency & cost techniques, and eval practices for agents that make it easier to buy and sell online.
How to assess the quality of garments: A Beginner's Guide {Part I} — Anuschka Rees
What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you see one. You need to be able to tell the difference between a durable, well-crafted piece and one that looks pretty on the rack but won't last more than half a
🚨Our new research examines agentic shopping: can you consistently predict (or, using marketing, influence) what an agent chooses? Nope. We found that even small differences (viewing order of pages, memories) changed AI preferences in unpredictable ways. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7…
