An award-winning implementation

Not On The High Street (NOTHS) is a curated online marketplace that connects shoppers with products from more than 5500 small creative UK businesses. The business champions creative entrepreneurs while empowering consumers to discover special finds to gift or for themselves.

Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for retail (formerly known as Discovery AI), we helped NOTHS transform their site’s search functionality and reimagine customer experiences.

• Pioneering Vertex AI Search for retail. We rolled out a production-ready instance of Vertex AI Search for retail in 12 weeks — one of the first to go live in Europe.

• Rapid results. Initial testing results were so impressive that after just one week the decision was made to roll out Vertex AI Search for retail.

• Boosted conversion rates. NOTHS experienced a 10% increase in search conversion rates YoY when Vertex AI Search for retail went live to all users.

• Revenue growth. NOTHS achieved a 2.2% uplift in revenue per user during A/B testing of the solution.

NOTHS believed Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for retail had the potential to simplify their tech stack, optimize search relevance and deliver a better shopping experience.

They turned to us to evaluate the tool against their existing technology and help them overcome key challenges. NOTHS wanted to:

• Increase visibility of more 350,000 products, ensuring shoppers didn’t see the same selection of products time after time.

• Improve data and product tagging consistency while working with thousands of small businesses. NOTHS also wanted to reduce manual data processes.

• Amplify relevancy through a powerful AI search tool that would return results that were both accurate and personalized to increase conversions.

We started this transformation with an offline search audit. In just two weeks, we ingested 340,000 products and 26 million events, identifying 90 use cases where we could compare Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for retail with NOTHS’ current tool.

After a successful audit, we implemented a production-ready solution in just 12 weeks. A/B testing helped us to show Vertex AI Search for retail's value. We directed 50% of website traffic to the current search tool and 50% to the new solution, measuring key metrics like search click-through rate, conversion rate and revenue per user.

The results were clear: Vertex AI Search for retail was the best tool to help NOTHS achieve its business goals.

What’s more, the entire audit and testing process moved quickly, allowing NOTHS to start experiencing meaningful value quickly. A/B testing finished in June 2023, with the solution scaled to 100% of users just a week later because of the strength of the results delivered by Vertex AI Search for retail.

This partnership saw one of the first implementations of Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for retail in Europe. The collaboration and rollout of the AI search tool were so successful that we were awarded a 2023 Google Cloud Industry Solution Services Partner of the Year Award for Retail Digital Growth.

And our partnership with NOTHS isn't stopping here. We're set to test a more personalized browsing function in 2024 and exploring the potential of Google's Recommendations AI.