How H&M reimagined discovery and reduced zero-hit search by 50% with Voyado

For retailers, understanding customer intent has become increasingly challenging. Customers expect search experiences that understand context, surface relevant products quickly, and adapt to changing needs and behaviors.

For H&M, those challenges are amplified by the scale and complexity of operating across more than 80 markets.

Key challenges included:

• Understanding customer intent across more than 80 markets
• Moving beyond keyword matching
• Interpreting context, not just search terms
• Helping customers discover relevant products faster
• Reducing dead ends in the customer journey

To better understand customer intent, H&M partnered with Voyado to create a more intelligent approach to search and ranking. Rather than relying solely on keywords, the retailer could begin incorporating richer signals that reflected what customers were actually looking for.

Result

50% reduction in zero-hit searches, helping more customers find relevant products and reducing friction in the discovery journey.

With thousands of products, constantly evolving assortments, and customers shopping for different occasions and needs, surfacing the right products at the right moment became increasingly important.

Traditional ranking models often rely heavily on clicks, making it difficult to account for factors such as stock availability, product newness, revenue performance, and changing customer intent.

With Voyado, H&M gained the ability to incorporate a much richer set of signals into search and ranking, including:

• Purchases
• Add-to-bag behavior
• Revenue performance
• Product newness
• Stock availability
• Customer intent signals
• Real-time ranking updates
• Flexible merchandising and curation

This gave H&M a more complete understanding of what customers were looking for and how products were performing, helping the retailer create experiences that feel more relevant, more responsive, and more aligned with customer intent.

Result

30% reduction in exits, helping customers stay engaged and continue their shopping journey.

Delivering relevant experiences across more than 80 markets requires a careful balance between global consistency and local relevance.

H&M needed a solution capable of operating at a global scale while giving teams the flexibility to curate experiences, adapt rankings, and respond quickly to changing customer behavior and inventory levels.

After evaluating a range of solutions, H&M selected Voyado as the best fit for its needs, and we worked together to deploy the solution across markets, creating a foundation that could support both scale and flexibility.

“Some of the solutions were amazing technically, but they didn’t offer any flexibility. We need to have up to 60 markets working in this tooling, so user friendliness is important for us.”
— Lars Gezelius, Global Head of Digital at H&M

Result

80% reduction in soft exits, creating smoother customer journeys and making it easier for shoppers to discover relevant products.

For H&M, improving search and ranking has built a foundation for what comes next.

Today, the retailer is working with Voyado to explore new ways of understanding customer intent and creating more relevant experiences in real time.

One area of focus is personalization. Through ongoing innovation with Voyado, H&M is testing how search results and product rankings can dynamically adapt based on a customer’s behavior during a session.

H&M is also exploring conversational commerce, allowing customers to express what they’re looking for in natural language. Rather than searching for a product category, customers can describe an occasion, a need, or even how they want to feel.

The goal remains the same: helping customers discover the right products, in the right context, at the right moment.