Toolstation, a leading UK supplier of tools and building materials, has significantly enhanced its digital commerce experience by partnering with Google Cloud to deploy Vertex AI Search for Commerce, powered by Google’s advancing Gemini AI models. This strategic collaboration aims to revolutionise the way Toolstation serves its customers, particularly the trade and DIY segments, by deepening the understanding of customer intent and delivering a highly personalised and intuitive product discovery journey across multiple channels.
A core challenge Toolstation addressed was the complexity of trade-specific language—slang and synonyms used by professionals and hobbyists alike that often resulted in poor search relevance and user frustration. The traditional keyword-based search systems struggled with these nuances, frequently returning irrelevant results and necessitating thousands of manual corrections. By integrating Vertex AI Search for Commerce into its online platform, customer contact centres, and even in-store tills, Toolstation has migrated its entire product discovery suite—including browse functionality, personalised recommendations, and customisation features—onto Google’s AI-driven platform.
The results speak for themselves: Toolstation has reported a 5.5% uplift in search-driven revenue and a 10% increase in click-through rates, alongside a dramatic 95% reduction in failed searches. Instances where customer queries returned no results have fallen to just 0.1%, while returning customer numbers have increased by 2%, signalling improved customer loyalty and trust. Rob Contreras, Toolstation’s Head of Innovation, emphasised the importance of aligning the digital experience with the expertise customers expect in-store, remarking to CXM Today that collaborating with Google Cloud was about fundamentally understanding customer intent to create a more intelligent and customer-centric experience.
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search, a component of its broader AI services ecosystem, deploys advanced generative AI and semantic search technologies to move beyond simple keyword matching to deeper comprehension of user queries. This enables an intuitive search experience that maps complex language to accurate results quickly. Maureen Costello, Google Cloud’s Vice President for the UKI and SSA regions, highlighted how the platform’s ability to understand intent at a profound level is transformative for modern retail experiences, yielding measurable business growth alongside enhanced customer satisfaction.
Vertex AI Search offers flexible integration capabilities and supports various data types and search modalities, including text and images, allowing for multi-modal search experiences tailored to business needs. Beyond relevance, it features business-rule customisation to optimise product rankings by availability and tags, and integration with essential analytics and commerce tools, such as Google Analytics 360 and Merchant Center. Recent platform enhancements also include enterprise-grade search tuning, vector search, embeddings, and generative features that allow businesses to curate responses in style and tone, further refining customer interactions.
This implementation is a prime example of how AI-powered search technologies are redefining e-commerce by harnessing generative models to elevate product discovery. Toolstation’s approach demonstrates how blending domain expertise with cutting-edge AI can foster deeper trust, boost engagement, and ultimately drive commercial success by delivering a seamless and knowledgeable digital storefront experience that matches the capabilities of their seasoned in-store colleagues.
As retailers increasingly face the challenge of meeting customer expectations for fast, relevant, and personalised shopping journeys, solutions like Vertex AI Search for Commerce provide a scalable, intelligent foundation. Toolstation’s journey underscores the importance of marrying AI innovation with strategic intent to unlock true digital transformation in retail, setting a new benchmark in how businesses serve complex, language-rich customer segments in both online and physical environments.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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