Coveo for Commerce capabilities

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Developer System Administrator Merchandiser Merchandising Hub Implementer

Coveo for Commerce personalizes the shopping experience on your B2C or B2B storefront. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on visitor interactions to decide which products to display, based on factors such as:

  • Real-time shopping behavior

  • Intent changes

  • Customer profile analysis

  • Similar user habits

  • Frequently added-to-cart items

This level of personalization is reflected throughout the entire shopping experience, powered by the three Coveo product discovery solutions: Search, Product listings, and Recommendations. Together, these solutions select and rank products based on each visitor’s behavior and current context.

This article introduces the capabilities that Coveo for Commerce offers, how they fit together in the Coveo Platform, and what they improve for your business. It doesn’t cover implementation. For step-by-step configuration guidance, see the setup guide.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) capabilities

Coveo for Commerce supports both B2C and B2B commerce implementations, with capabilities tailored to each.

Business-to-consumer (B2C)

Coveo’s commerce capabilities help you deliver a personalized shopping experience that drives conversions, improves average order value, and increases your product inventory coverage. It delivers the experience that visitors expect when they shop online and helps them find the products they want faster.

Coveo for Commerce offers a range of features that help you deliver an optimal shopping experience, including:

  • Relevant search results

  • Intelligent listing pages

  • Personalized product recommendations

  • availability channels, including buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) capabilities

Business-to-business (B2B)

In B2B scenarios, Coveo for Commerce helps remove friction from the buyer’s search experience, whether buyers want to browse your product inventory, find a replacement part, or learn more about your products through rich content and videos.

For example, Coveo can automatically recommend products based on past purchases and propensity to buy again. Furthermore, Coveo offers solutions that help you manage complex pricing and entitlements, such as showing different prices to different buying groups.

Features

  • Product indexing: Coveo for Commerce can index your product content and establish relationships between products, variants, and availability channels. Coveo supports indexing content from various sources, including SAP Commerce Cloud, Shopify, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

  • Data tracking: Coveo tracks visitor behavior and interactions with your site, such as clicks, views, and purchases. This data is used to train AI models that power Coveo’s product discovery solutions, as well as to power Coveo’s analytics and reporting features.

  • AI-driven product discovery solutions:

    • Search: Coveo makes searching for products easier with predictive, typo-tolerant search suggestions and AI-powered relevance ranking.

    • Product listings: Coveo provides visitors with the ability to refine their browsing on category pages with dynamic faceting, allowing visitors to sort on criteria such as brand, size, price, and more.

    • Recommendations: Coveo tailors the experience and maximizes cart value, even for first-time visitors, with machine learning that recommends products based on in-session behavior and current context.

  • Merchandising: Merchandisers sometimes need to override automated ranking to meet business goals, such as promoting overstock or seasonal products. To help merchandisers achieve their goals and optimize the product discovery experience for their visitors, Coveo offers the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH). The CMH is a web-based application that lets merchandisers create rules to promote products and optimize search results and recommendations. It also monitors the performance of their merchandising actions using core metrics.

How Coveo for Commerce fits in the Coveo Platform

Coveo for Commerce builds on the same foundation as any other Coveo implementation: a Coveo organization, the Coveo index, query pipelines, and Coveo Machine Learning (Coveo ML) models. The commerce-specific pieces connect to that foundation as follows:

  • Storefront structure: Your storefronts are organized into properties, each of which supports one or more locales. A tracking ID identifies each storefront in the Coveo Analytics events you send, and you register that tracking ID as a property in your organization.

  • Product content: Your product inventory lives in the Coveo index, loaded through a Catalog source and described by a catalog entity.

  • The link between the two: A storefront association maps a property and locale combination to a catalog entity, and generates the query pipelines that serve that storefront.

  • Serving the storefront: Your storefront requests products through the Commerce API, either directly or through Coveo UI libraries such as Coveo Headless and Coveo Atomic.

  • Tuning: Coveo ML models rank results within those query pipelines, and merchandisers adjust the outcome in the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH), where merchandising actions are segmented by tracking ID.

For how these pieces are configured together, see the setup guide.

What Coveo for Commerce improves

  • Your indexed catalog data is used to build product embeddings and vectors that feed Coveo AI personalization models, so the quality of your product content directly affects how well those models perform.

  • Coveo AI models are built to expand product inventory coverage, which means that more products are displayed to visitors. Visitors see relevant long-tail products alongside popular ones, tailored to their session.

  • Providing product recommendations favors cross-selling and increases items added to cart, therefore increasing the average order value.

  • You can monitor the impact of personalization and relevance with commerce dashboards that measure how search affects global goals, such as conversion, average order value, and revenue.

What’s next

The setup guide covers the best practices when implementing Coveo for Commerce search features. Start there to learn the fundamentals before moving on to more specific topics.

From there, continue with the area you’re working on: