“For us, the power of Searchspring is its ability to read between the lines, understand our shoppers’ intent, and use smart logic to help customers discover products they’ll love. The platform also helps us make informed decisions, removing the guesswork from what we think shoppers want and showing us what they really love.”
Alicia Davis
Digital Project Specialist, Incu
The Brand
Derived from incubate or incubator, Incu brings fresh national and international brand names to shoppers keen for the thrill of discovery. Constantly a step ahead, Incu stocked Topshop and Acne in Australia before these standalone stores landed, has collaborated with cutting-edge labels Ganni, APC and Rag & Bone, and showcases its in-house signature label.
Founded in 2002 by twin brothers Brian and Vincent Wu, introducing shoppers to new brands and carefully curating collections has been a foundation of the Incu vision. The brothers created a unique retail concept inspired by travel, international designers, and upcoming Aussie labels. Thirteen retail locations later (including Rag & Bone and APC stores), Incu works with over 200 of the world’s most innovative and established designers.
The Challenges
Incu wanted to reflect its personalised and genuine in-store customer service on its online platform. However, after using native platform functionality for some time, it became apparent that standard search capabilities left shoppers wanting more.
Alicia Davis, Digital Project Specialist at Incu, explains, “If you have a large catalogue of products or many different brands, especially for multi-brand retailers like us, you need your site search to work flawlessly. Shoppers can be quite brand-term driven. So the last thing you want is to miss opportunities because your site is returning zero results for specific and branded queries.”
The most common customer experience feedback about the online store was that finding the right products was challenging. Shop assistants also use the website to enhance the in-store product discovery journey, showing customers additional items available online or in the warehouse. Unfortunately, in-stock items were out of sight using the existing online search functionality.
Additionally, manual merchandising processes were consuming a lot of Alicia’s time;
“Before using Searchspring, I remember a wide sales event we had covering many categories – around 20 pages across two sales collections. I spent an entire 8-hour day going through a merchandising process of ‘drag product, save, drag again, save’, grouping brands and piecing together an appealing display for our sales collections. We also spent around 2 hours each week just merchandising new arrivals pages. It now takes about 5 minutes on a Friday to tweak and check collections using the rules and logic in Searchspring.”
“The better you can serve the right product to the right person in the quickest way, the more enjoyable that shopper experience is going to be. When your customer has a remarkable experience, they’re going to come back, they’re going to tell their friends, and that’s because you’ve just added something to their life.”
Alicia Davis
Digital Project Specialist, Incu
The Solutions
Incu partnered with the trusted search, merchandising, and personalisation platform, Searchspring to make online conversions the company’s strong suit. As a result, Incu is now using innovative technology to continually refine the customer experience while breaking down roadblocks in the product discovery journey.
“It ultimately comes down to that shopping experience”, Says Alicia. “Shoppers don’t want to see your online storefront looking stagnant every time they visit because your lean merchandising team doesn’t have the time or resources to make things more exciting. The benefit of using a tool like Searchspring is the ability to deliver more interesting, personalised experiences while also saving significant time for your merchandisers.”
Searchspring has brought Incu’s nimble ecommerce team a powerful suite of search, merchandising, and personalisation product recommendation features. The technology has created more seamless shopping experiences tailored to each customer’s tastes that have seen Incu boost conversion.
Alicia comments, “We stock a range of interesting and exclusive brands. But most of our traffic is driven by category or brand queries, so slight spelling errors were often leaving shoppers at zero-results dead ends. Searchspring helped us minimise those zero search results, more easily monitor trends, and do clever things like using synonyms and personalised recommendations to keep the discovery journey going. These technologies show shoppers more of what they want, and we’ve seen rapid uplifts in conversion and cart size as a result.”
Searchspring’s synonyms and zero search results reports help Incu’s merchandisers continuously improve the shopping experience by refining and enhancing search terms. And even if shoppers see a 404 page from clicking an older campaign link, Incu has turned 404 pages into sales opportunities.
Personalised product recommendations serve customers with items they’re sure to love based on previous shopping behaviours. Tailored product suggestions can be placed strategically anywhere on your site, serving shoppers with similar and ‘complete the look’ items, trending and best-selling product suggestions, cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, and more.
“By implementing a search, merch, and personalisation solution, we’ve been able to switch from a short-term to long-term strategic approach. If you’re just sitting in the backend, shuffling things around and working reactively – which is the case for a lot of lean teams – it’s difficult to plan more than a week in advance. You’re also potentially not making the best decisions because you’re always looking at a granular level and doing things based on opinions. With intelligent technology and automation that manages things effectively with global, highly-customisable rules, we can focus on the big-ticket items and future roadmap projects to further optimise the site.”
Alicia Davis
Digital Project Specialist, Incu
The Results
From implementing Searchspring in 2021 to 2023, Incu saw a 15% increase in revenue attributed to shoppers using search with 6.1x more revenue per visit generated vs without search. Conversion rates from search-derived orders have also been lifted 3.1x higher than those without search.
The results aren’t the only thing creating a lasting impression. Alicia comments on the ease and professionalism of the setup process, “Searchspring managed the bulk of work with our implementation quite seamlessly – something which is a huge benefit during peak periods like Black Friday / Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Boxing Day sales. The team was extremely organised and collaborated really well with us when they needed our reviews and testing. The whole process was fast but efficient. We also started noticing conversion uplifts within a week of going live.”
Searchspring’s data intelligence is now driving actionable insights, significant time-savings, and outstanding outcomes for the Incu team and their shoppers.
“The reporting capabilities of Searchspring are brilliant. Of course, there are insights you can get from Google Analytics, but they can be hard to read and adjust with custom segmented reporting.” Says Alicia. “With Searchspring, we have a consolidated dashboard of the most important data, such as shoppers using search, conversions, revenue, and other metrics comparing search-driven journeys to those without search. The information at hand has helped us minimise and re-route things like spelling mistakes and zero results to get the right products in front of shoppers.”
Clever product-boosting rules and automation have also cut merchandising time and effort from over half a week to mere hours. As a result, the team now has the breathing space to prioritise strategic initiatives and create even more remarkable shopping experiences.
Incu is now integrating Searchspring with Klaviyo, its email marketing platform, to show personalised product recommendations at even more stages of the buyer journey. Alicia and the team look forward to this integration’s tailored email cross-sell and product discovery capabilities, which are set to keep pre-and-post purchase experiences as fresh and exciting as Incu’s online store.
“It’s been a really enjoyable partnership between Incu and Searchspring. We work really closely with our Account Manager, Jacinda. It’s fantastic having someone locally, in the same time zone, and with a wealth of knowledge from her in-house days in previous retail roles. She picks up on things, she notices things that need attention, and she gives suggestions based on what other clients are doing. If you want to pick up the phone to call, you can. It’s not always like that with every tech partner. It’s such great support to work with a company like that, where they make time for you and you know they care.”
Alicia Davis
Digital Project Specialist, Incu
