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

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 ecommerce team assisting him in optimizing the online experience for the brand.

The Challenge

Before using Nosto products, The WOD Life web team 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.

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.

The Solution

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 that have low inventory

“I wanted to sort our collections without having to make a new sorting rule for each one”, according to Harley Scotland.

On their homepage, to facilitate product catalog discovery, The WOD Life displays 3 different product recommendations blocks, with algorithms based on: new arrivals, best-sellers based on the most purchases within the last 24 hours in a “Most popular right now” block, and 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. They added a product recommendation block “Most popular in this category” at the bottom of the category page. Additionally, on their product detail pages, they show 2 different types of product recommendations based on cross-selling with “People who viewed this product also purchased” and based on browsing history with “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”.

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

The WOD Life also uses 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.

The WOD Life uses Catalog Explorer, a recent feature of Nosto that allows them to have a complete overview of 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.

“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.

The Results:

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%

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