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A.L.C. doubles CVR on search pages by leveraging merchandising rules during sales

About A.L.C.

Founded by Andrea Lieberman in 2009, A.L.C has become a premium clothing brand for women everywhere. The brand releases exclusive collections that are inspired by fashion classics and brought to life with a modern twist.

A.L.C. has worked closely with Nosto and has utilized multiple modules within our commerce experience platform–from Content Personalization to Personalized Emails–to make every touchpoint for their customers highly relevant.

“We first started with on-site personalization, moved to merchandising, and then email. Now we’ve moved into Search because at a high level we believe in offering our customers the most relevant experience possible and rolling out personalization across all consumer touchpoints, wherever possible,” says SVP Marketing & Digital, Hilary Peterson

Given A.L.C. ‘s success with our commerce experience platform, we were excited to partner with them in deploying Nosto’s new search feature.

Challenge

Originally, A.L.C. was utilizing a search function which had more of a one-size-fits-all approach, and tailoring it was time consuming and reactive. The brand was looking to go beyond those limitations, and wanted a search solution that was more customizable, such as adjusting product sorting on search page results during specific seasons.

This flexibility would help because as a premium brand, A.L.C. mainly promotes new, full-price items throughout the year, which makes discounted items hard to uncover during sale periods. The lack of customization within Shopify’s native search function made it difficult for shoppers to discover the deals they were looking for during those times.

Other pain points A.L.C. faced were slow site speed and poor relevancy, which would entail manual fixing. “Our old search feature was more work than we were willing to put in on a day-to-day basis, and the results weren’t necessarily fantastic. For example, we would receive questions about why certain items were displayed in the results. Also, there were delays in results, which affects shopper retention,” says Hilary.

Similarly to the challenges above, their teams’ limited bandwidth meant they needed a search product they could implement easily for a quick turnaround, knowing that an updated search feature was crucial to their on-site strategy.

In short, A.L.C. needed an easily implementable search solution that could scale with the brand, and powerful automation to ensure out-of-the-box relevancy while taking out the manual check-ins that exceeded the capacity of their smaller team.

Solution

Implementing Nosto’s Search gave A.L.C. the advanced customization features they needed. By using our merchandising feature and scheduling tool, A.L.C. was able to set up a specific ranking rule during sale periods that overrides the rule they have throughout the year. This scheduled rule would promote high conversion discounted products with a good inventory level on their site during those times.

When it came to improving A.L.C.’s search site speed and relevancy, our AI-powered Search was able to quickly surface results while delivering highly relevant search results through self-learning algorithms. Without needing constant attention, our search feature automatically learns and improves based on user behavior, which took out the legwork for the brand’s team on manual improvements.

Our Search is able to understand multi-word and complex queries as well, such as “satin pants” and “blue cotton dress”, and provide relevant results.

Lastly, we streamlined the implementation process for our search solution so that not only is it fast and easy to implement, but also includes a rich and sophisticated feature set right out-of-the-box to boost time to value.

Being able to leverage AI is best, especially because we don’t have to manually change anything. We worked very closely with the Nosto team to determine the look and feel, and the client management is off the charts. Overall, it took less than a month to get Search up. That, and there wasn’t any undue burden or stress on our development resources either.

Hilary Peterson, SVP Marketing & Digital

Results

Since implementing Nosto’s Search, A.L.C.’s click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR) on search pages showed noticeable growth within the specific sale rule compared to the generic rule. CTR showed a 30% increase, while CVR more than doubled, outpacing the site CVR over the same period!

The results showed that building specific merchandising rules for certain times of the year, like high peak seasons, meets shoppers’ expectations and is crucial for conversion. The scheduling option enabled A.L.C. to plan ahead of the campaign, giving their team time back to focus on other activities. “The global merchandising rule really increased the visibility of the sale in all areas of our site for that specific time. Once it’s over, our merchandising goes back to pushing our new collections. There’s a million things going on in every ecommerce team, so being able to schedule ahead and have it off your checklist is so helpful,” says Hilary.

Overall, A.L.C. also found that their relevancy is better, where complex queries with multiple product attributes, such as “blue cotton dress”, retrieve relevant results. That, and implementing our Search feature took little resources and time.

As A.L.C heads into the new year and continues to scale their Search implementation, we look forward to working with them on what’s next for their brand!

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