Gym+Coffee slashes time and effort by scaling Search performances with merchandising rules

About Gym+Coffee

Since starting in Ireland 2017, Gym+Coffee has quickly become a fully-fledged, international athleisure brand that is cited as one of the fastest-growing retailers in Ireland.

Challenge

Gym+Coffee experienced an impressive growth period when athleisure boomed during COVID-19. But when the world opened up, and the market naturally simmered—dropping traffic across this vertical—Gym+Coffee began to focus on maximizing the traffic they were getting, as much as possible.

“Although I hadn’t worked with Nosto before, the product suite was impressive, and I’d heard from various people that it was great technology to increase conversions and average order value.” says Ecommerce Manager, Lee Mcnamara.

Going live with a number of our personalization modules in September 2022, their team was quickly impressed with the sophistication of Category Merchandising. When they learned we were launching a Search solution with similar capabilities, they were keen to move that function to Nosto too. “As soon as Joanna [our Customer Success Manager] let us know there was a search product coming, I knew straight away we’d want it”, says Lee.

Moreover, their existing search solution demanded significant manual effort to optimize results during the likes of sales periods when stock levels were volatile. “Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021 was a crazy-busy time. Items were flying out of stock and we were seeing massive size breaks in certain products. To demote those items in the SERPs took a lot of manual effort”, says Lee. “It was just impossible for a small team”.

Gym+Coffee hoped Nosto’s new Search solution would bring them smarter automation, and optimize their search results for greater chance of conversion—as with their Category Merchandising setup.

Solution

Since moving to Nosto, Gym+Coffee’s capabilities around merchandising search results is not only aligned with what they can do with Category Merchandising, but is also more advanced. “With our previous solution, we simply couldn’t put out-of-stocks to the bottom of a search results’ page, or promote products based on margin”, says Lee.

And when it came to Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022, it was a different story. Gym+Coffee were able to set up merchandising rules for the sales weekend to ensure users searching for any BFCM-type verbiage would be met with a selection of products they’d specifically tagged in Shopify. They also applied a merchandising rule whereby products with higher inventory would be boosted.

“Being able to integrate this into Nosto and then give sorting preference to items with certain stock levels ensured results were constantly optimized for possible conversion—and handled it for us.”, says Lee.

Another bonus they’ve seen since switching to Nosto is around the user experience of how autocomplete (the capability to suggest relevant products as shoppers start typing a query). “This was quite buggy with our previous solution, but with Nosto, the user experience is sleak. And, most importantly, it gives me relevant predictions for what I’m typing in” says Lee.

Our conversion rates are hitting target. Whether it’s through Category Merchandising or Search, our traffic’s converting well.

Lee Mcnamara, Ecommerce Manager

Results

With the brand’s main goal being to maximize conversions of their site traffic, we’re delighted Gym+Coffee are seeing success in this area. Moreover, Gym+Coffee are pleased with the efficiency our solution’s granted them. “As we’ve found with all Nosto products, the time-saving piece has been instrumental. To be able to plug in rules and feel confident they’ll deliver the right results, and not have to constantly monitor and adapt them has been a dream”, says Lee.

As we continue to work alongside Gym+Coffee in evolving our search solution, we look forward to seeing what they’ll next explore. Whether that’s segmentation within search (in line with the rest of their on-site personalization strategy), or having content within the search results (to highlight their many brand events and initiatives)—we’re confident they’ll nail it. Stay tuned!

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