Vertex AI Search Drives 5.5% Revenue Growth for UK Tool Retailer Toolstation

Toolstation, one of Britain's fastest-growing tool retailers, generates approximately half of its transactions through its website and mobile app, serving trade professionals, DIY enthusiasts, and home improvers across 580 UK locations. The company faced a critical challenge: customers searching online for products—often using synonyms, brand names, and trade-specific terminology—frequently received no results or irrelevant suggestions. A previous third-party search tool couldn't interpret the nuanced language customers used, leading 2% of searches to return zero results and causing frustrated customers to abandon their carts or search via Google before re-entering Toolstation's site. The merchandising team had accumulated thousands of manual rules to improve results, but this approach was time-consuming and could not scale to cover less-frequent search terms.

Toolstation partnered with Google Cloud to implement Vertex AI Search for commerce, which uses machine learning to automatically recognize and interpret customer search intent. The company uploaded its entire product catalog overnight and tested the solution on live traffic within 24 hours. Results were immediate and dramatic: searches returning zero results plummeted from 2% to 0.1%, click-through rates increased by 10%, and overall search-based revenue grew by 5.5%. Additionally, customer complaints about irrelevant results dropped by 30%, and returning customer rates increased by 2%. Beyond the website, Toolstation expanded the solution to its call center—where typos in product searches previously failed—and to in-store point-of-sale systems, where staff could now serve customers more efficiently. The expansion of Vertex AI Search to recommendations and personalization features delivered a 10% increase in revenue attributed to recommendations.

Toolstation eliminated the need for manual search rule management, freeing its merchandising team to optimize other areas of the ecommerce platform. Machine learning models continuously improve with every customer search, click, and purchase, automatically optimizing results without human intervention. The company is now experimenting with advanced capabilities including tile navigation for refined searches and conversational search powered by natural language processing, with plans to implement Gemini and Vertex AI to scan handwritten shopping lists in-store. By consolidating its discovery tools onto Google Cloud, Toolstation simplified its technology stack while unlocking significant operational and revenue gains, positioning itself for sustained competitive advantage in retail commerce.