Have you ever tried to look for a specific product on an e-shop and felt frustrated?

Were there no applicable filters available? Did you have to scroll through an endless product list?

Finding the right product is the most critical task for a modern e-shop. And yet, not all e-shops ensure that.

Search accuracy highly depends on the type of search. The two most prominent ones - traditional and vector search - can make or break the user experience.

So, how are the two different? Which one should you rely on?

Traditional search in e-commerce: losing its potential

What is it?

Traditional e-commerce search relies on keywords, word frequency, and word similarity to index and retrieve data.

It uses algorithms that match the words in your query to the words in the product titles and descriptions and rank the results based on their popularity and relevance.

What are its benefits?

Traditional e-commerce search might be highly beneficial for small businesses that do not offer various products. It smoothly works for processing textual data and matching text-based queries with products.

This way, traditional e-commerce search could be a low-cost business solution for providing relevant product recommendations.

Where’s the catch?

And yet, traditional is not necessarily the best.
Traditional e-commerce search comes with certain limitations. For example, it may not capture the meaning and context of your query or the products you are searching for.

Let’s say your website visitor does not know the precise name of the coffee-making appliance her spouse asked to buy. This way, for users who do not know the precise product term traditional search engines would be insufficient and rather frustrating.

Besides, it usually does not support image-based queries. The user cannot upload the photo to find the wanted product.

And that might become a deal breaker for some tech-savvy users.

What is it?

Vector search is a newer, more advanced, and more complex e-commerce search. It uses mathematical representations of products and queries to find semantically similar matches.

Items with closer vectors are considered more similar. For example, the distance of the vectors for “harry potter” and “fantasy” will be significantly smaller than the distance between “harry potter” and “washing machine”.

Just like a human, vector search understands the search intention, ambiguous language, and uncertainties.

Imagine asking a shopping assistant for a product: “Well, I suppose I need some sort of coffee maker I could take when camping.” Just like a human would help you find what you need, the e-commerce store run with vector search would do the same.

Unlike keyword-based search, vector search does not rely on exact words or synonyms but on the meaning and context of the text (or images) being searched.

What are its benefits?

Vector search is what makes a superb user experience for your shoppers. Due to its ability to understand complex search queries, including natural language queries, different languages, or misspellings, vector search returns highly relevant search results.

It also replaces a shopping assistant, because it extracts product information from both textual queries and uploaded images. This way, your website visitors can pick the way to search for the wanted products.

The e-commerce search that supports vector search (like LupaSearch) will serve more accurate and personalized product recommendations.

Where’s the catch?

There has to be, right?
Not necessarily.

For small businesses with little product assortment, vector search can be a relatively expensive solution.

And yet, for medium to large businesses, vector search turns an e-commerce search into a sales, conversions, and revenue-increasing machine.

And that is worth it.

LupaSearch - your go-to partner for vector search-boosted shopping experience

Integrate vector search into your e-shop in no time.

Pick a reliable and experienced partner like LupaSearch, the leading provider of AI-enhanced vector search solutions for e-commerce, and level up your e-commerce game.

Drop us a message and book a product demo today.
Get ready to take your business to the next level.