The WOD Life increase conversion by 70% on Shopify by leveraging Personalisation & Category Merchandising

Industry: Sporting Goods
Platform: Shopify Plus

The WOD Life is an Australian brand that curates the highest quality apparel, accessories and equipment for high performance training.

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CHALLENGE

The WOD Life needed to increase conversion rates within their collections and make their category merchandising easier.

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SOLUTION

The WOD Life uses Category Merchandising, Product Recommendations, Catalog Explorer and Pop-ups.

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RESULTS

The WOD Life saw a 70% increase in conversion, a 86% increase in average visit value and a 10% increase in AOV.

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About The WOD Life

The WOD Life is an Australian brand that curates the highest quality apparel, accessories and equipment from the best brands on the planet for high performance training. They sell products in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. 

Harley Scotland, Senior Ecommerce Product Manager for The WOD Life deals with the whole website project management, with developers and e-commerce team assisting him to optimise the online experience for the brand.

Challenge

Automating Manual Merchandising

Prior to using Nosto products, The WOD Life webteam did manual merchandising, which not only took a lot of time, but it meant that the team would have to manually go in and update all the products.  

The issue was that, whenever they added new ones in, it didn’t take into consideration some older products that were selling well. In terms of inventory monitoring, they had set up some rules where if something was selling out, it would just go off the site. So the products were displayed by order of entry and not by selling performance or level of inventory.

Implementing flexible personalisation

Also, the online store used recommendation blocks with another provider, but it was harder for the team to get in and make any subtle changes, or run A/B tests between which recommendation algorithms worked best.

One of the main key advantages with Nosto is the improvement in the conversion rate and being able to show customers exactly what they’re looking for. Also, I think Nosto has got a good pathway for expanding: you can start with only a few core products and then add more of them to your tech stack.

Harley Scotland, Senior E-commerce Product Manager, The WOD Life

Solution

The WOD Life uses several products of the Nosto platform to optimise their online shopping experience: Category Merchandising, Product Recommendations, Pop-ups and Catalog Explorer.

Our main goal was to increase conversion rates within our collections and also make it easier for us to merchandise our categories. We needed to figure out how to make the merchandising easier, how to automate it and make it better”, says Harley Scotland.

Category Merchandising to automatically sort products based on performance metrics

In order to deliver category page experiences that accomplish their merchandising goals, The WOD Life implemented Category Merchandising on their website. To drive more discovery for their new arrivals and increase conversion, Nosto’s algorithms automatically change product order and selection in their category page based on their own merchandising objectives.

The WOD Life applied different sorting rules on most of their category pages.

The most commonly used sorting rule for The WOD Life’s category pages is based on the below metrics:

  • 20% weighting on High Buys products
  • 10% weighting on High conversion products
  • 5% weighting on New product arrivals
  • -20% weighting on products which have low inventory

I wanted to be able to sort a lot of our collections without having to make a new sorting rule for each one. I knew that it would be important for customers to show products that sold well and with a high conversion rate. As for inventory level: if the product has a low inventory, it’ll be automatically ranked negatively, to avoid having customers seeing products with low SKU sequence availability. The final criteria is based on product newness: we wanted to promote our newest products at the top of the category page; however, with less weighting, because we wanted to be more data driven in terms of revenue”, according to Harley Scotland.

Product recommendations in all the customer journey to increase conversion and AOV

The WOD Life use product recommendations on most of their webpages to personalize the experience for each of their visitors.

Nosto allows for a lot of freedom just in how you go about setting up your own recommendation blocks.” according to Harley Scotland.

On their homepage, in order to facilitate product catalogue discovery, The WOD Life displays 3 different product recommendations blocks, with algorithms based on: 

  • New arrivals
  • Best sellers, showing the most buys within the last 24 hours in a “Most popular right now” block
  • Browsing history, showing products the visitor has already looked at with a “Just for You” block

The brand also uses product recommendations to surface Best Sellers on their category page helping visitors easily find popular products in a specific category. To do so, they added a product recommendation block “Most popular in this category” at the bottom of the category page. 

On their product detail pages, they show 2 different types of product recommendations based on :

  • Cross-selling: “People who viewed this product also purchased” 
  • Browsing history: “You recently viewed”

To increase AOV at the end of the purchase journey, The WODlife integrated into their mini cart a product recommendation block “Still interested in these”, showing the visitor’s browsing history.

Finally, in the shopping cart, in addition to showing the browsing history of the visitor, they show personalized recommendations “don’t forget these”.

Abandoned Cart Pop Ups to increase conversion

The WOD Life also use abandoned cart popups to re-engage visitors when they return to the site. A popup “Pick up where you left off” shows the products left in cart to remind customers of their last site visit.

Catalog Explorer: to have a clear overview of online performance and supporting data-based decisions

The WOD Life uses Catalog Explorer, a recent feature of Nosto that allows them to have a complete overview on their product and catalog performance, to make decisions based on data, such as inventory level or product KPIs. As an example, it helps them choose the products that they can push once they’ve been live for a while and have got some performance insights on.

I invest a lot of my time going through Catalog Explorer. It’s something that we’re going to be adding to our monthly meetings internally, just going through for example what stock has heaps of inventory but has a really poor sales velocity. So Nosto displays that pretty clearly to us” says Harley Scotland.

Results: Significant increases in average visit value, conversion and AOV

By using Nosto’s commerce experience platform, The WOD Life could directly measure savings in time in their e-commerce team’s workflow, as their merchandising is automated and a lot less manual.

Also, by using the Nosto products, The WOD Life optimised the performance of their online store. For the visitors that came through Nosto’s products:

  • The conversion rate increased by 70%
  • The average visit value increased by 86%
  • The average order value increased by 10%

70 %

increase in conversion

86 %

increase in Average Visit Value

10 %

increase in AOV

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