AI Search That Learns: Product Discovery for Four Online Stores

Search is where many businesses first meet AI: not a feature to show off, but the box where customers type what they want. These four stores show what happens when that box learns.

The Challenge

The stores had one thing in common: too many products to browse.

• Cutwel Tools sells more than 25,000 engineering tools.
• Widdop & Co. sells more than 13,000 trade products from a catalogue that never stops changing.
• Green-tech sells a large range to landscapers and growers who know exactly what they need.
• The Royal British Legion’s Poppy Shop has poppies, pins and gifts in thousands of variants.

Keyword search fails all of these customers in the same way. It matches the words but not the intent. It puts the wrong products first. It doesn’t get better.

Our Approach

The team at PureNet, our sister company in the PureNet Group, added AI search that learns from behaviour. It watches how customers search, browse and buy, and uses that to rank the results. The products people actually choose rise to the top, and the ranking keeps adjusting as buying patterns and the catalogue change.

Each store had different systems behind it, so the search was connected to each one:

• Cutwel: product data, stock and prices from its Merlin ERP.
• Widdop: a complex, bespoke back office.
• The Legion: both its Magento shop and its Poppy Appeal ordering portal.

What We Delivered

• The Royal British Legion: AI search on a redesigned Poppy Shop, with a one-step checkout. The same search went into a bespoke portal that moved the paper-based Poppy Appeal ordering online for 3,500 organisers.
• Cutwel Tools: AI search on a B2B store joined to Merlin. Alongside it: a promotions engine, a B2B account area, and saved lists for seasonal reordering.
• Widdop & Co.: AI search and merchandising on a bespoke B2B store joined to its back office, so trade buyers find products faster and Widdop can promote ranges throughout the buying journey.
• Green-tech: AI search on a new site the team updates in-house. Later, one product information system was put behind all five of its websites.

The Outcome

• The Royal British Legion: the Poppy Shop had its most successful year online. Revenue was up 205%, conversion up 46% and average order value up 6%. The team also spent less time managing the shop.
• Green-tech: sales through the main site rose 40% in the first three months.
• Cutwel: orders placed through site search rose significantly once AI search went live, and online revenue has grown every year since.

These figures are for each project as a whole: new design, new checkout and new search together. They show what the search was part of, not what it did alone.

Why It Matters Beyond Ecommerce

The lesson is in CONVERGE, chapter 4. AI search like this took years to build. Once it existed, a client could switch it on in weeks. That is the specialist tier of the AI Opportunity Pyramid: a business buys AI like this ready-made and connects it to its own systems, rather than building it.

The same idea now applies inside businesses. Staff spend hours looking for answers that already sit in documents, SharePoint and old tickets, so search that understands the question is often the first AI to pay for itself. That is what our knowledge assistants do.