Report:
Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery
How does Gartner define the Search and Product Discovery market in 2024?
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, natural language and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration, and curation of business rules to make a product discoverable based on business needs), product recommendations, catalog navigation (and SEO keyword automation), personalization and analytics capabilities through SaaS to enable customers (B2C and B2B) to transact. They also enable providers (merchandisers, content managers, and search specialists) to support customer experiences. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search interfaces are now appearing.
Key Facts for Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery in 2024
- Publication Date: 13 May 2024
- Document ID: G00792131
- Coverage: Global
- Authors: Mike Lowndes, Aditya Vasudevan, and 2 more
- Core Purpose: This research evaluates Search and Product Discovery vendors to help digital commerce leaders understand the market and support product discovery initiatives without rebuilding entire digital commerce platforms.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
- By 2026, at least one new generative AI (GenAI)-based conversational UI pattern in search and product discovery will disrupt traditional search and browse UIs, penetrating at least 5% of the market
How was the Search and Product Discovery market evolved in 2024?
- First version of this Magic Quadrant, replacing the Market Guide for Digital Commerce Search
- Applications augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons, and product selection
- Provide search (keyword, natural language, visual), merchandising, product recommendations, catalog navigation, personalization and analytics through SaaS
- Serve both B2C and B2B customers
- Conversational search interfaces emerging with generative AI
- Can be adopted without rebuilding entire digital commerce platforms
- Shift from relevance to ROI KPIs as technology ownership moves from IT to business
- Automation of merchandising using AI and customer behavior data
- Growing demand from B2B digital commerce market
- API-first architecture expected for interoperability with modern and legacy systems
- Disruption of underlying technology with proprietary engines, graph databases, vector search, and GenAI
What product features are required to be included in this year's evaluation?
- Product search
- Merchandising
- Catalog navigation (browse), including facets and filters, replacing a static taxonomy up to (but not including) product detail pages (PDPs)
What are the common features of top products in the Search and Product Discovery space?
- Type-ahead/rich autocomplete
- Support for semantic search via natural language technologies, vector embeddings and/or graphs to understand query intent and map products to that intent
- Results personalization
- Search analytics
- Productized integrations to digital commerce platforms
Scope Exclusions
- General site search only deployments (not focused on digital commerce)
- Personalized recommendations only deployments
- Revenue and customers from deployments unrelated to commerce search and product discovery
Inclusion Criteria
Vendors must, among other requirements:
- The vendor must actively offer for sale a minimum of one SaaS digital commerce search and discovery product that meets the Market Definition and stated functionality
- The digital commerce search and discovery product must support over 50 current production customers
- Vendors must have onboarded more than five customers to the search and discovery product in 2022
- The search and discovery product must serve customers in more than one unique industry vertical within the digital commerce space with a minimum of 5% of production customers in that industry
- The digital commerce search and discovery product must be used by paying customers in more than one geographic region
- Vendors must have ARR software revenue from their digital commerce search and discovery product of more than $9 million
Ability to Execute — Relative Weighting
- Product or Service - High
- Overall Viability - Medium
- Sales Execution/Pricing - High
- Market Responsiveness/Record - High
- Marketing Execution - Low
- Customer Experience - High
- Operations - NotRated
Completeness of Vision — Relative Weighting
- Market Understanding - High
- Marketing Strategy - Low
- Sales Strategy - Medium
- Offering (Product) Strategy - High
- Business Model - NotRated
- Vertical/Industry Strategy - Low
- Innovation - High
- Geographic Strategy - Medium
FAQs
Q: What does this research cover?
A: This research covers the Search and Product Discovery market, evaluating 18 vendors across their ability to execute and completeness of vision. It analyzes applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate product navigation, filtering, comparisons, and selection through search, merchandising, recommendations, personalization, and analytics capabilities. The research includes vendor strengths and cautions, market definitions, evaluation criteria, and emerging trends including generative AI and conversational search interfaces.
Q: Who should use this research?
A: Digital commerce leaders should use this research to understand the commerce search market and support product discovery initiatives. Organizations evaluating or implementing search and product discovery solutions can use it to identify vendors that match their specific requirements for functionality, industry expertise, technology approach, business model (B2C/B2B), geographic coverage, and cost. Buyers should match their requirements to vendors' offerings and use the companion Critical Capabilities research to rank vendors by specific functional and nonfunctional criteria relevant to their use cases.
Q: What are the mandatory features of vendors included in this market?
A: Vendors included in this market must provide three mandatory capabilities: 1) Product search - the ability to search for products in a digital commerce context, 2) Merchandising - tools for automation, configuration, and curation of business rules to make products discoverable based on business needs, and 3) Catalog navigation (browse) - including facets and filters that replace static taxonomy up to (but not including) product detail pages.
Q: What are some reasons for not being included in this report?
A:
- Not offering a SaaS digital commerce search and discovery product
- Supporting fewer than 50 current production customers
- Onboarding five or fewer customers in 2022
- Serving customers in only one industry vertical or having less than 5% of customers in each vertical
- Operating in only one geographic region
- Having ARR software revenue of $9 million or less from search and discovery
- Revenue and customers primarily from non-commerce use cases like general site search or recommendations only
Q: What differentiates Ability to Execute vs. Completeness of Vision?
A: Ability to Execute evaluates vendors on the quality and efficacy of their processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, focusing on current capabilities, financial viability, sales effectiveness, market responsiveness, and customer experience. Completeness of Vision evaluates vendors on their ability to articulate logical statements about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces, focusing on market understanding, product strategy, innovation, and strategic direction for future success.
Reference
- Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery, 13 May 2024, ID G00792131
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