How Casio streamlines product discovery & encourages shoppers to buy direct

About Casio:

Casio is an iconic Japanese consumer electronics company that offers a wide range of products including watches, calculators, and musical instruments. Best known for its watches, Casio also owns a secondary watch line, G-Shock, that’s geared towards a younger audience and specializes in durable, high-quality pieces that are perfect for outdoor activities and sports. Aside from their DTC websites, Casio and G-Shock products are also widely sold among many major high-street retailers.

The Challenge:

Since Casio and G-shock products are available from a number of third-party retailers, it’s imperative that the brand maintains engaging DTC ecommerce stores that deliver relevant, streamlined shopping experiences and encourage their audience to buy direct.

With a broad product offering and a large percentage (75%) of traffic coming from mobile, optimizing product sorting for shoppers is also critical. However, this was demanding huge manual effort from their modest ecommerce team and constrained just how much they could do.

The team was also frustrated by the amount of resource they had to dedicate to maintaining a relevant search experience. Their existing solution failed to pull through relevant items, even for simple queries (e.g. that specified color), unless the team spent time manually linking attributes for each product. Given their high SKU count and new products being added to their catalogs regularly, this was a prevalent issue.

The Solution:

By implementing Nosto’s AI-powered search, Casio and G-shock now provide a hyper-relevant search experience that improves product discovery and reduces administration. Shoppers can now search seamlessly based on any product attributes, such as color, shape, or product names with little intervention from the team.

Implementing Category Merchandising was also a key time-saver. Casio now benefits from AI-powered merchandising rules that automatically reorder product listings on their category pages to prioritize products with high click-through rates and conversions while demoting out-of-stock products. This not only drastically saves the Casio team from having to merchandise their category pages manually, but greatly improves the shopper experience by highlighting popular products that are available to buy, cutting through their large product range.

To further streamline product discovery, Casio also uses Nosto’s Product Recommendations across their Casio and G-Shock sites. To optimize the placement of these, Casio A/B tests various placements and timings, such as on product listing pages, when a newer model of an item is available, and even on zero search results pages.

Casio wanted to create a sense of urgency within their PDPs to encourage shoppers to purchase. To do this, they integrated FOMO messaging (powered by Content Personalization) to flag how many times a product had been bought (on the G-Shock site) or viewed (on the Casio site) within the last 24 hours. They also included low stock level warnings for both sites, triggered by real-time catalog data.

Finally, they deployed an effective retention campaign on their PDPs using behaviorally triggered Pop-Ups offering a discount code that appears when shoppers copy a product SKU—as though they’re going to search for the product elsewhere. Crucially, this was a smart way of encouraging conversions while maintaining brand integrity by avoiding site-wide discounts.

“With a large number of retailers stocking our products, our websites have to offer the best possible experience to engage and convert customers. Using Nosto enables us to deliver this seamless experience, increasing sales through innovative campaigns such as smart pop-ups, personalized messaging, recommendations, search, and category merchandising.”

Monique Green, Ecommerce Manager, Casio UK

The Results:

Casio has significantly reduced manual effort spent optimizing product discovery using Nosto’s Search, Category Merchandising, and Product Recommendations—all while delivering on key business KPIs. The set-it-and-forget-it ability of Nosto’s platform allows them to focus on other areas of their ecommerce strategy.

By cleverly using Pop-Ups and FOMO messaging, Casio has successfully encouraged shoppers to purchase direct, with their behaviourally triggered pop-ups seeing a 40% conversion rate, increasing sales and reducing bounce rates.

Up to 18% CVR on cart pages
26% of sales attributed to Product Recommendations on the timepiece-only G-Shock site
11% of sales attributed to Product Recommendations on Casio site

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