At the Google Cloud Summit held in London in October 2024, Google Cloud showcased its role in driving retail innovation through partnerships with leading industry players Dunelm and OnBuy.

The UK's Dunelm, a prominent homewares retailer, has partnered with Google Cloud to significantly enhance its online customer experience.

Leveraging Vertex AI Search for Retail, Dunelm now offers Google-quality product discovery on its website. This translates to a more seamless and personalised shopping journey for customers.

Early results have been promising. The new platform significantly reduces search friction, with virtually no searches returning zero results. This translates to a more intuitive shopping experience, allowing customers to quickly find the right products across Dunelm's extensive homeware and furniture categories.

"Website search abandonment costs retailers millions of pounds annually, as consumers are unable to find the specific products they need," said Tara Brady, president of Google Cloud for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"We're proud to collaborate on this important project to use generative AI to improve consumer experiences and shape the future of retail."

OnBuy, one of Europe's fastest-growing online marketplaces, announced its collaboration with Google Cloud to achieve global expansion with modern, scalable cloud infrastructure.

This collaboration grants OnBuy access to a range of Google Cloud products and services such as infrastructure, data storage and managed services.

It will enhance both seller and customer experiences, reduce costs and unlock new revenue streams.

OnBuy will benefit from Google Cloud's expertise in cloud management, data analytics and AI. This includes leveraging Google Cloud's virtual private cloud for a secure, regionally-spanning virtual network.

The Cloud provides fast, cost-effective data storage and Cloud SQL manages their databases for business continuity.

OnBuy is also exploring Vertex AI, Google Cloud's AI platform, to train product auto-categorisation algorithms that can predict new product categories at scale.

"We turned to Google Cloud because we were looking for a like-minded, fast-moving tech company that could complement our rapidly growing business," said Cas Paton, founder and CEO of OnBuy.

"Most importantly, we needed a platform that we could trust with our data, which is hugely important to us, both as a business and as part of our commitment to our customers."