Analysis of Live Search Data Shows 67% of User Clicks Originate From Natural Language Queries

BATAVIA, NY, UNITED STATES, September 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- XTAL Search has been powering AI-powered site search on willowgroupltd.com since March 6, giving professional buyers a faster way to find products across Willow Group's wholesale catalog using an exact SKU, familiar keywords, or plain-language descriptions. XTAL Search and Willow Group Ltd. today shared the results from that deployment.

XTAL replaced the stock search on Willow's storefront on March 6. The deployment works within Willow's existing e-commerce platform and preserves the company's branded product-grid experience, without requiring Willow to re-platform its storefront.

Willow Group supplies wholesale baskets, containers, packaging, displays, floral and garden products, and home decor. Buyers often arrive with a specific job in mind, but the relevant product information may be spread across abbreviated ERP titles, descriptions, dimensions, materials, and category data. XTAL enriches and searches that information together so a buyer can enter a query such as "something to display wine bottles," "red oval willow baskets," or a known item number and receive relevant products in the same shopping experience.

In Willow's initial two-week production measurement window, natural-language queries accounted for 67% of product clicks from search, search involved 52% of orders, and 17% of orders were completed with searches that previously would have returned no results.

These figures describe observed search-assisted journeys. They do not claim that XTAL generated all associated revenue or establish an incremental conversion lift.

"Our buyers know the product, the use case, or the problem they are trying to solve, but they should not have to know the exact wording in our system. With XTAL, they can search in their own language or enter the SKU they already use. The early results show that search is becoming an important part of how customers navigate and buy from our catalog," said Jim Walsh, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Willow Group Ltd.

"Willow is exactly the kind of catalog where search has to understand both people and product data," said Tom Rudczynski, Founder and CEO of XTAL Search. "A wholesale buyer may search by SKU, material, shape, occasion, or the display they are trying to build. The launch shows that one search experience can support those different paths without forcing the merchant to replace the commerce platform it already runs. Search can be live in under a week without replacing the platform."

XTAL's search layer combines natural-language query understanding, semantic and keyword retrieval, and merchandising controls. Results are returned inside the merchant's existing storefront, while product clicks and downstream orders can be measured using first-party event data.

About Willow Group Ltd.

Founded from a family basket-making tradition dating to 1928, Willow Group Ltd. is a wholesale distributor of baskets, containers, packaging, displays, floral and garden products, and home decor. The company serves businesses including florists, garden centers, gift shops, food-service operators, specialty retailers, and other professional buyers. Willow Group is based in Batavia, New York. Learn more at https://www.willowgroupltd.com

About XTAL Search

XTAL Search helps ecommerce and wholesale merchants make complex product catalogs easier to find and manage. Its AI-powered search technology supports natural-language discovery, exact product lookups, catalog enrichment, and brand-aware merchandising without requiring a storefront re-platform. Learn more at https://www.xtalsearch.com

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