How Oh Polly Drives Ecommerce Success with Nosto: Insights from eCommerce Expo 2024
At eCommerce Expo 2024, Nosto client and womenswear brand, Oh Polly, took the stage to discuss how AI-powered personalization and automated merchandising have transformed the brand’s online store and impacted its ecommerce team.
Millicent Morgan, Senior Marketing Manager EMEA/APAC at Nosto, moderated the conversation with Lauren Muir, Product Manager at Oh Polly, and Phil Gregory, Regional Head of Customer Experience EMEA/APAC from Nosto.
They delved into how the Oh Polly team uses Nosto’s Commerce Experience Platform to personalize their ecommerce websites, optimize their customer journeys, and drive revenue growth.
Here’s a breakdown of the key strategies Oh Polly is using with Nosto, and the game-changing results they’ve achieved!
Scaling and Internationalization with a Data-Driven Approach
Part of what drew Oh Polly to Nosto’s platform in the first place was its user-friendliness— Lauren joked on the panel about how “even our developers like using it which doesn’t happen often!”.
Crucially, Nosto’s no-code interface made applying successful ecommerce merchandising rules across different regions easy for Oh Polly—promising a level of flexibility that was crucial for efficient scaling.

When launching their U.S. ecommerce site, the Oh Polly team found that they could “lift and shift” the best practices and learnings from their customer data for their UK store to the U.S. market, giving them a head start without starting from scratch.
While customer behavior in the U.S. differed slightly, their ecommerce merchandising strategies that worked in the UK provided a solid foundation. This flexible and scalable approach, made possible by the Nosto platform, allowed them to adapt and optimize continuously without needing extensive resources or development.
Continuous Testing and Optimization: A Strategy That Never Stops
A key theme throughout the discussion was the importance of A/B testing to the brand. Lauren emphasized that the success of their ecommerce strategy with Nosto is not about finding one perfect solution—it’s about ongoing testing and refinement. This allows Oh Polly to stay agile, quickly adapting to new market trends, seasonal changes, and real time customer behaviors.
As Phil noted, one of the biggest advantages of Nosto’s AI-powered platform is that it takes the heavy lifting out of the process. While it might seem like a lot of work, Nosto automates much of the optimization, allowing Lauren and her team (and all other Nosto clients!) to focus on high-level strategy instead of manual updates.
As an example, Lauren showcased how “data trumps opinion” when they tested their category merchandising, comparing having it versus not having it at all. Clicks on the categories that had category merchandising increased by 70% and conversion rate and revenue increased by about 50%.
These results motivated them to roll it out across all their categories with confidence, and later tests showed that doing so increased clicks by 270% and conversion rate by 80%.
Personalized Product Recommendations at Every Customer Touchpoint
The Oh Polly website uses Nosto’s personalized product recommendations substantially, with these featured across all pages of their website.
Whether a visitor lands on the homepage, a product page, or even the checkout page, they’re met with tailored recommendations designed to enhance their shopping experience. Lauren explained in the discussion that Oh Polly uses “slightly different strategies and approaches for each product recommendation.”, and highlighted a few examples:
- For new visitors: Best-selling items are showcased to help new users quickly find what others are loving as they won’t be familiar with the products.
- For returning shoppers: Recently viewed items or personalized recommendations surface early, minimizing the effort it takes to find previous products they’ve shown interest in.
- At checkout: Based on what is in their shopping cart, Oh Polly adds an extra product recommendation to increase cross-sells.
Lauren said that the cart recommendation has been a very successful strategy for Oh Polly, especially as they “don’t have a massive basket size” and mostly sell single dresses that people are buying for occasions. She explained how this strategy drives a 5-10% conversion rate, even for high-ticket items such as £70 dresses—which has massively improved AOV.
This success demonstrates the power of well-placed recommendations at the critical, final stages of the buying process.
Solving the Out-of-Stock Challenge with Visual AI
The panel also covered how Oh Polly frequently faces the challenge of viral products selling out quickly, leading to missed conversion opportunities. Lauren explained how Nosto’s visual AI-powered product recommendations have given them an innovative solution, however.
Lauren spoke about how these enable customers to seamlessly find visually similar products when their preferred item is out of stock. For example, if a customer selects a white mini dress that’s unavailable, Nosto will automatically recommend other in-stock white mini dresses, preventing potential sales loss.

Lauren stressed that this feature has been especially valuable for high-traffic products that quickly sell out, allowing Oh Polly to capture interest and direct shoppers toward relevant alternatives as opposed to losing them altogether.
Notably, Oh Polly is also using this strategy for pre-order items, helping customers discover similar options available for immediate purchase, further increasing conversions.
Automating Ecommerce Merchandising: Time-Saving and Profit-Boosting
Lauren highlighted on the panel how one of the most significant features Oh Polly has implemented through Nosto has been their automated Category Merchandising.
Before using Nosto, Lauren explained how their team spent countless hours manually organizing their category pages. With Nosto’s automation, they dramatically reduced the time spent on merchandising and saw a significant increase in conversion rate. This combination of time-saving and revenue growth made category merchandising one of the most impactful optimizations for Oh Polly’s team.

For their ecommerce merchandising, they apply a “two-pronged” approach to their segmentation. Lauren said that about 80-85% of their catalog is dresses, but “dresses come in many different shapes, forms, sizes, and people have got their own preferences in terms of what products they like”.
Lauren explained why merchandising to product affinities like maxi dresses, mini dresses or long sleeve dresses helps to increase conversions. “Our chance of making shoppers convert is so much higher if we just show them what they want or what we think that they want.”
Next, Lauren said that Oh Polly segments by price affinity. Oh Polly has a wide range of prices and a “wide range of customers, some of whom like to shop discounts and some of whom like to shop full price”, so Oh Polly creates different shopping journeys for discount affinity shoppers compared to full-price shoppers.
“There’s no point in us showing high-price shoppers 70% off sales because we’re just reducing our profit margin by doing so. Those who shop full price will see primarily full-priced products.”
For discount shoppers or shoppers with a lower AOV, Oh Polly will show them higher-sales products because that is what they’re looking for.

The Future of Personalization at Oh Polly
Looking ahead, Phil spoke about some additional Nosto capabilities that Oh Polly is soon to benefit from. One example was leveraging Oh Polly’s product returns data into their Nosto’s product recommendations. Phil explained how this will allow Oh Polly to refine their merchandising strategies based on product return likelihood, helping reduce returns and improve profitability.
Additionally, Phil spoke about how he’s looking forward to Shopify’s new checkout, and how post-purchase flows are set to offer even more personalization opportunities. These new features will give Oh Polly further ways to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction across every stage of the journey.
Conclusion: Personalized, Automated Ecommerce for Long-Term Growth
The discussion at Ecommerce Expo 2024 made it clear that Oh Polly’s success with Nosto is built on a foundation of personalization, automation, and continuous optimization. By leveraging Nosto’s AI-powered Commerce Experience Platform, Oh Polly has been able to deliver hyper-relevant product recommendations, automate time-consuming processes like merchandising, and scale globally.
If you want to know how you can implement similar personalization in ecommerce across your website, speak to a Nosto expert.