8% improvement in conversion per visitor
4% increase in products added to cart
Significant increase in search selection rate
Finland's top online retailer uses Vertex AI Search for commerce to personalize results, boost conversions, and drive sales.
Finland's top online retailer uses Vertex AI Search for commerce to personalize results, boost conversions, and drive sales.
The search for smarter discovery capabilities
We've been a long-time user of Google Cloud, so it made sense to build on our existing data foundation in BigQuery. Google Cloud is a leader in AI innovation, and if anyone understands search, it's Google, so we were confident it would help us deliver the intelligent search we needed.
Anton Paasi
Business Development Lead, Product Information Management, Verkkokauppa.com
When it comes to online shopping, speed and convenience are at the heart of a positive customer experience. For Verkkokauppa.com, Finland's most popular online retailer, enabling its millions of monthly visitors to find what they want, when they want it, is vital to maintaining its NPS +90 customer satisfaction score. However, Verkkokauppa.com's traditional on-site search function struggled to help customers quickly find the right products among its 50,000-item catalog. It also had difficulty understanding customers' increasingly complex search queries.
To sustain its leadership in a competitive market, Verkkokauppa.com needed to transform its website from a simple catalog into an intuitive, intelligent shopping assistant. To do so, it searched for an AI technology provider to replace its basic search function with an AI discovery engine. With all its product data already housed in BigQuery, and a long history of using Google Cloud for compute, Verkkokauppa.com chose Vertex AI Search for commerce.
"We've been a long-time user of Google Cloud, so it made sense to build on our existing data foundation in BigQuery," explains Anton Paasi, business development lead, product information management at Verkkokauppa.com. "Google Cloud is a leader in AI innovation, and if anyone understands search, it's Google, so we were confident it would help us deliver the intelligent search we needed."
Delivering highly relevant results with AI-powered search
With Vertex AI Search for commerce, Verkkokauppa.com has turned its online store into a personalized experience. The core of the solution lies in connecting the AI search engine with the retailer's extensive product data to deliver the relevance and speed customers expect, helping to drive sales.
"Vertex AI Search for commerce delivers highly relevant results without us having to spend significant time on manual optimizations," says Paasi. "We can trust it to work effectively right out of the box."
The system's performance relies on three core capabilities: query understanding, data-driven personalization, and speed. The solution starts with advanced query understanding. Using powerful commerce-tuned large language models (LLMs), the search engine moves beyond simple text-matching to understand the customer's true intent, even when faced with ambiguous or complex natural language queries.
The significant improvement in search result selection rate means customers are actually finding the products they're looking for. Then when we see significant increases in conversions and products added to cart, it's clear Vertex AI Search for commerce is having a direct impact on sales.
Anton Paasi
Business Development Lead, Product Information Management, Verkkokauppa.com
This capability is crucial for a 50,000-product catalog, ensuring customers find exactly what they need, even if they misspell terms. As a result, Verkkokauppa.com has seen a significant improvement in the selection rate in search results as well as impressive improvements in category browse click-through rates, confirming better result accuracy.
The solution also makes sophisticated use of data-driven personalization. By ingesting and analyzing real-time user events — such as clicks, views, and products added to cart — alongside its product catalog data in BigQuery, the data platform creates a single view of the customer. Vertex AI Search for commerce then uses this behavioral data to automatically train and tune its own models, intelligently ranking relevant products not just by basic relevance, but by their likelihood to convert into a sale for that specific user. As a result, Verkkokauppa.com's new AI discovery engine has delivered an 8% improvement in conversion per visitor, along with a 4% increase in products added to cart.
Finally, the fully managed, scalable Google Cloud infrastructure provides the necessary elasticity to handle high-traffic peak times and process the vast amounts of data required for real-time personalization. This architecture enables fast implementation while ensuring a reliable, low-latency experience for millions of visitors.
Pioneering the future of agent commerce with Google Cloud
Having the best technology isn't the end point, it's the launch pad. Having the best-in-class technology foundation with Google Cloud will allow us to build toward the future of agentic AI and continue to rewrite the rules of retail.
Anton Paasi
Business Development Lead, Product Information Management, Verkkokauppa.com
The successful adoption of Vertex AI Search for commerce has solidified Verkkokauppa.com's reputation as a Nordic leader of digital innovation. With Google Cloud, the retailer has created a better and more personal shopping experience, turning product discovery into a core competitive advantage.
Looking ahead, the focus is on extending this personalization across the entire site — from content to recommendations — as well as exploring conversational search and agentic commerce, supporting more complex, multi-turn natural language queries. With Google Cloud Verkkokauppa.com is ready to embrace the shift toward intelligent AI agents that can complete full, complex shopping tasks, driving the future of retail.
"Having the best technology isn't the endpoint, it's the launch pad," Paasi concludes. "Having the best-in-class technology foundation with Google Cloud will allow us to build toward the future of agentic AI and continue to rewrite the rules of retail."
Verkkokauppa.com is Finland's most popular online retailer. Known for its fast delivery experience, extensive product catalog, and market leadership in consumer electronics, it's aiming to rewrite the rules of retail.
Industry: Retail
Location: Finland
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Vertex AI Search for commerce
