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By Peter Curran, GM of Commerce, Coveo
The struggle to deliver seamless and relevant shopping experiences across multiple customer touchpoints – mobile, in-store, online, and social media channels – is real. Successful omnichannel retail depends on how well brands integrate data and sales channels. This challenge grows with the complexity of the systems and technologies that make up the retail tech stack. When brands fail to deliver consistent and personalized experiences across all channels, they miss the ultimate goal: providing shoppers with the same level of service, product availability, and brand messaging, regardless of where they browse or buy.
A study by the IHL Group reveals a staggering annual loss of nearly $1 trillion in retail sales due to out-of-stock items. The “endless aisle” strategy can remedy this by elevating omnichannel retail. It allows customers to browse and order products not physically available in-store, but which can be sourced from another location, a warehouse, or another store. By embracing this strategy, brands can expand the range of products they offer without taking up valuable physical shelf space.
This vision became the goal of our customer, Freedom, an Australian furniture and homewares retailer with 60+ locations. The brand recently set out to transform its 44-year-old business to meet today’s customer demands– to do so, Freedom revamped its ecommerce platform, integrated a dropshipping model, and adopted AI-driven search and product discovery, thereby redefining both its in-store and online shopping experiences.
The Digital Transformation Behind an “Endless Aisle”
To lay the foundation for this transformation, Freedom replatformed its digital channel with SAP Commerce Cloud in 2020. This move increased online sales from just 6% to 25%. To further support its goal of being “omnichannel first” across the company, the retailer began accounting for overall sales across its brick-and-mortar stores, instead of separating ecommerce sales reporting, for all 10,000 products available both in-store and online.
The approach succeeded, driving significant growth. In approximately 18 months, Freedom grew its product offerings by 4.5 times, expanding its catalog from 10,000 to 45,000+ items and counting, through strategic dropshipping partnerships. This new phase transformed the company from an “endless aisle” to an “endless choice.” To enhance product discovery and streamline operations with such a large online catalog, Freedom recognized the need for a powerful search solution.
Bad Search Drives Shoppers Away – Enter AI Search
Digital discovery shapes the buying decisions of most shoppers, according to findings from our 2025 Commerce Relevance Report, based on a survey of 4,000 consumers in late 2024. One segment of the report examines the impact of ineffective product discovery: 72% of shoppers abandon an ecommerce site when they can’t find what they need quickly, with 53% turning to Google and 36% heading directly to a competitor.
Clearly, a catalog like Freedom’s, with tens of thousands of products, presents discoverability challenges. Fortunately, Freedom partnered with Coveo, which specializes in enhancing relevance and improving site search experiences for shoppers by using AI to respond more precisely to context and behavior.
For Freedom, an intelligent AI search solution made sense. It supported their rapid growth and streamlined operations for merchandisers. Within a month of implementing Coveo’s AI Platform™, Freedom reported impressive results, including a 15% increase in customer sessions using Coveo’s AI search function and a 5.5% improvement in Average Order Value (AOV) year-over-year for customers engaging with onsite search.
These early results show significantly improved shopper access to Freedom’s expansive catalog, with intelligent search making the difference. Here’s why:
- Intent detection – Users may not always know the best words to search, but an intelligent search platform understands intent in language and behavior.
- Automatic re-ranking – While basic site search matches keywords to text in an index, AI search considers multiple dimensions. Result rankings depend on previous actions and context, not just the typed query.
- Question answering – A cognitive search engine extracts the answers people need, helping them move forward faster.
- Dynamic content filtering – With intelligent search technology, facets automatically adjust to each query, classifying, reordering, and removing irrelevant filters while allowing users to narrow their results.
Conclusion
For Freedom, AI and intelligent search made its holistic endless aisle vision come to life in the most efficient and effective way. As more retailers adopt personalized AI-search layered over existing systems, platforms, and content types, they will continue to unlock new possibilities with a tech stack that’s smarter and more capable than ever before.
About the author
Peter Curran is the General Manager of Commerce at Coveo. Over the years, he has worked across various eCommerce business models, categories, and company sizes. Peter co-founded and acted as President and Head of Sales for Cirrus10, a Web Content Management and Ecommerce Technology consultancy. Cirrus10 was acquired by Lucidworks in 2019. At Lucidworks he served as GM of Commerce, SVP Go to Market, and CRO. Peter then managed his own strategic consulting firm, implementing and tuning Constructor.io and OpenSearch. With 30 years of experience in enterprise technology, Peter has dedicated the last 15 years to enhancing product discovery across diverse industries, use cases, and platforms.
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