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

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.