Make Holiday Gift Shopping Easier With AI Product Tags

Holiday gift shopping is hard enough — don’t make your customers wade through irrelevant PDPs. Instead, use AI-enriched product tags to make every search experience a positive one.

With 96% of consumers planning to buy holiday gifts online this year, there’s nothing more important for eCommerce brands and retailers than to create a convenient and accessible shopping journey that ends in satisfaction. If your on-site search and recommendation engines can truly understand what shoppers are looking for and surface relevant gift ideas on the spot, you’ll be primed for success. However, this is easier said than done, especially if your brand’s website has thousands of SKUs. 

A large inventory means numerous product detail pages and just as many opportunities for shoppers to get frustrated and bounce to a competitor’s site. This is where product metadata – the source of product tags – comes into play. In this post, we’ll explain how you can make holiday gift shopping easier for your customers through the use of AI-generated product tags. Let’s go!

What Is Product Metadata and Why Is It Important?

Every piece of inventory in your catalogue should have a detailed list of relevant information – or metadata – that can be used to describe items, show relevant search results, create categories, and structure your website navigation. 

Product metadata can include (but is not limited to):

  • Titles
  • Brand names
  • Attributes 
  • Prices
  • Descriptions
  • Variants, and 
  • Availability

Rich product attributes help your on-site search and recommendation engines to hone in on the right results. For example, the attributes for fashion items can be further broken down to include:

  • Style 
  • Color 
  • Cut
  • Length
  • Material
  • Hardware
  • Occasion 
  • Seasonality, and 
  • Gender 

The challenge for many online retailers is how to identify all of this metadata in the quickest and most accurate way possible. This is particularly important when shoppers are looking for holiday gifts. When the keywords in their on-site search can match up with the attributes listed in your product metadata, you will be able to seamlessly connect shoppers to gifts they’re going to love giving.

The bottom line is that implementing a robust, automated product tagging infrastructure can result in more holiday purchases, increased brand loyalty, and a higher chance of repeat purchases both during and after the holiday season. 

How to Create the Most Efficient Process for eCommerce Product Tagging

In the past, product tagging was a manual process that required massive amounts of time and manpower. Today, we can use visual AI to automatically identify all kinds of attributes based on product photos. 

Visual AI uses a combination of computer vision, machine learning, and neural networks to understand and interpret the visual world. It is the key to quick and efficient product tagging because it can automatically recognize objects in product photos and apply accurate, organized and up-to-date labels – or product tags – in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. 

Benefits of a Robust Automated Product Tagging Infrastructure

Here are some of the top ways a robust product tagging infrastructure can help holiday shoppers find what they’re looking for: 

  • Matching intent: With consistent, detailed, and accurate product data, your on-site search, menu navigation, and filters will be able to show customers the items in your catalogue that most closely match their search intent – even if their search terminology differs from the labels or language you use in your product catalogue. 
  • Better organic search results: Descriptive tags help to push your products and website to the top of external search results like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Baidu. This means more customers can discover your products even if they’ve never heard of your brand.
  • Personalized recommendations: By understanding the product attributes that your shoppers are gravitating towards, detailed product tagging enables more precise personalized product recommendations, which boost the entire customer experience.
  • More effective online merchandising: When you ensure that your catalogue contains a rich and detailed amount of product attributes, you can manage your products and display them on your website in a way that is intuitive for your customers, even when you have a wide range of items in stock. 

Examples: What They Meant vs. What They Got

Every shopper will have their own way of describing the gifts they are looking for. With an enriched AI-generated product tagging infrastructure in place, your website is much more likely to surface relevant results. However, if your product tags are limited, inaccurate, or inconsistent, your customers are likely to see some odd items in their search results. Woe to the eCommerce or merchandising manager whose shoppers get results like these: 

This shopper wasn’t looking for camping gear…

This shopper wanted something classic, not class of 1970…

This shopper wasn’t looking for beach wear…

This shopper wanted a floral cut, not a floral pattern…

This shopper was looking for jeans, not a boyfriend…

Making Each Moment Count

When time is of the essence, a poor search experience will simply lead holiday shoppers to ditch your website and take their business to a competitor. That’s why it’s so important to think about how you can optimize your search experience to provide shoppers with the most relevant results. When you have an AI-enabled product tagging infrastructure in place, you’re going to be able to surface the right products at the right time, leading to a higher conversion rate and increased holiday sales.