CUSTOMER STORYClient spotlight: Search that feels like a shortcut: Coppel’s award-winning product discovery

Client spotlight: Search that feels like a shortcut: Coppel’s award-winning product discovery

Picture a busy evening during El Buen Fin, Mexico’s biggest shopping weekend. A shopper taps “iPhone” into the search bar—no full model name, no SKU, just the common word for what they want. A beat later, they’re browsing clean, relevant options, comparing specs that actually matter, and moving toward checkout without the usual detours. That’s the moment Coppel set out to multiply.

With 1,800+ stores across Mexico and Argentina and a fast-growing ecommerce audience, Coppel focused on removing friction where it starts—the search bar. That shopper-first approach earned the retailer Lucidworks’ 2025 Superstars of Search Innovation Award. 

Coppel’s data told a consistent story—shoppers use everyday language, not exact catalog terms. Roughly 70% of queries were product-type searches—“refrigerator,” “smart TV,” “running shoes”—but the legacy taxonomy wasn’t built to respond in that language, so navigating to the right product felt like work.

To flip the experience from catalog-first to customer-first, Coppel partnered with Lucidworks and introduced an index-time machine learning model that classifies products based on how shoppers naturally describe them. As items are ingested, the system reads attributes, predicts the right product type, and applies consistent labels—no endless manual tagging sprints, no brittle rules that break under real-world phrasing. Now the catalog understands intent on day one. 

This wasn’t AI for AI’s sake. Coppel tuned relevance with live behavioral signals, tightened facets to mirror how everyday shoppers compare options, and rolled out changes safely ahead of peak traffic. The result is quick, confident retrieval for exact queries, and guided discovery when the search is wide open. For customers, that means fewer dead ends, better filters, and the right results on the first try—less scrolling and a faster path to “add to cart.”

The proof landed during El Buen Fin 2024. With intent aligned to taxonomy and ranking, shoppers found what they wanted faster—and it showed:

• Product page views climbed 58%
• Click-through rates improved 5.2%
• Search-led transactions rose 6.5%
• Search-assisted revenue grew 25%

Search is where the experience begins, and now it begins better. Coppel’s shopper-first engine trims the friction, boosts the signal, and turns browsing into buying—again and again.