“Searchspring has helped us to overcome the technological hurdles that were holding us back. The time we saved is now being better spent, enabling us to scale our marketing, and become more effective in our merchandising efforts. Ultimately this has led to h2 revenue growth.”

Erik Goodlad
Chief Technologist, MacSales

The Brand

Founded in Woodstock, IL in 1988 by Larry O’Connor, MacSales.com has been the premier online source for upgrade and expansion products for Mac and iOS device users around the world.

For more than 20 years, they’ve offered outstanding upgrade and tech products as well as comprehensive, free resources that help Apple fans get the most out of their devices.

The Challenges

MacSales is a thriving business with a customer base that’s growing year-over-year. The steady increase in annual traffic, combined with the evolving needs of online shoppers means that their technology needed to become more robust in order to keep up with demand.

MacSales deals with a large catalog of products, and ships hundreds of thousands of specialty products to nearly 200 countries every year. In analyzing their third-party search solution, they saw an opportunity to better serve this niche with faster, more intuitive navigation.

As shoppers shift to mobile and become more concerned with speed, it was obvious that their search and navigation solution was neither delivering the speed or the relevancy that would be necessary to satisfy their customers.

MacSales also sought a provider that could be more responsive. It was important to them that they be able to rely on a provider that was invested in their success. Their previous provider supplied limited merchandising functionality, requiring MacSales to spend hours each day managing aspects of their site that Searchspring could automate.

“It’s important to us that our technology partners are able to keep up with the demands of our business. In this case, that meant speed and flexibility, both of which Searchspring was able to deliver to all our shoppers. Searchspring has also been much more transparent about the development of their solution, showing us that they will continue to innovate and make their product even better.” Erik Goodlad, Chief Technologist at MacSales

The Solutions

In early 2016, MacSales decided to partner with Searchspring to improve the relevancy of their search and navigation, and to improve speed as they see more customers shopping from their mobile devices. Searchspring’s focus has always been on delivering the most relevant shopping experience possible.

MacSales utilizes their Site Search solution which leverages a complex algorithm that analyzes shopper context, intent, and user behavior to deliver the most relevant products for every search. The Relevancy Engine analyzes the behavior of past shoppers to find the products that have resulted in the highest click-through and conversion rates. This guarantees that shoppers who utilize search will see only the products that are most relevant to them. At the same time, the machine learning algorithms in the Product Awareness layer read existing product data to gain a deep understanding of what each product is, taking hours of manual work out of the equation.

Searchspring’s technology is designed to scale to the needs of retailers of every size, and is capable of delivering the incredible speed regardless of device type. The Titan Infrastructure was designed by experts with decades of experience to ensure the fastest page load speeds, and best-in-class reliability to ensure that retailer sites are functioning optimally even during unexpected traffic spikes.

The Results

Migrating to Searchspring has proved to be hugely beneficial to MacSales on multiple levels. MacSales has seen massive improvements in both speed, and relevancy.

In terms of relevancy, MacSales overall conversion rate has increased by more than 25% since migrating to Searchspring, indicating that the relevancy of the navigation has improved vastly. At the same time, site search visitors are converting at a rate nearly 17% higher since the migration, and bounce rates have decreased by 11%.

Since migrating to Searchspring, response times have also decreased by more than 50% from .57 seconds .25 seconds. This is significant and critical since most shoppers admit that they will abandon a site if a page doesn’t load within four seconds.

“Searchspring has helped us to overcome the technological hurdles that were holding us back. The time we saved is now being better spent, enabling us to scale our marketing, and become more effective in our merchandising efforts. Ultimately this has led to h2 revenue growth.” Erik Goodlad, Chief Technologist at MacSales