Gartner defines search and product discovery as applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons and, ultimately, selection of products. They provide search (keyword, semantic and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration and curation of business rules) and product recommendations. These applications also provide catalog navigation (including SEO keyword automation and guided selling assistants). Personalization, optimization and analytics capabilities should also be available. Platforms are deployed as SaaS. They provide administrative tooling to enable digital commerce roles (merchandisers, content managers and search specialists) to support customer experiences via no-code. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search and guided selling assistants are now appearing. Search and product discovery applications can provide the digital customer journey from landing on a website or app to finding the correct product and adding to basket. Search results can be highly visual, using engaging layouts and multimedia. Content other than product information, such as educational information, compliance materials, customer reviews and related news may also be included in search results to engage customers and further support buying decisions.
User-generated content software (or UGC platform) helps brands curate visual, video, and text product or company mentions from social media and other sources to support marketing brand-building efforts. This platform curates and cultivates user-generated, influencer, and short-form video content to scale content efforts. The content is then used across channels including website, email, advertising, events, and in-store. It is supported by Artificial Intelligence and data analysis tools to help identify the best-performing media, content use, sales, engagement, and conversion ratio. UGC software is used by travel, hospitality, CPG, retail, auto, and nonprofit industries among others to placement across paid and owned channels and syndication. The content curated and cultivated by UGC platform fills content gaps, adds scale, builds trust and enhances credibility to deliver against objectives such as awareness, conversion and advocacy.