Abel Butler
The Brand
Since 1988, HealthPost has remained at the forefront of ethical online retail, offering a thoughtfully curated selection of natural health, beauty, and eco-friendly lifestyle products. The brand is a trusted name in wellness in New Zealand, championing sustainability, ingredient transparency, and conscious consumerism.
HealthPost saw an opportunity to further amplify its impact across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and beyond with the acquisition of Flora & Fauna and Nourished Life. While HealthPost specializes in premium natural health products, Flora & Fauna caters to environmentally conscious shoppers seeking plastic-free and vegan-friendly alternatives, and Nourished Life focuses on wonderfully clean, non-toxic beauty.
Together, the Group (HealthPost, Flora & Fauna, and Nourished Life) shares a values-driven ethos, creating a powerhouse of ethical retail to serve discerning shoppers in ANZ and around the globe.
The Challenges
Despite industry leadership across ANZ, the Group still faced a growing pain: how to help customers navigate the size and diversity of product catalogs—quickly and efficiently. With thousands of SKUs and a multitude of categories across three brand identities, it was no small task to ensure shoppers enjoyed a seamless path to purchase.
Beyond basic product search, customers were often looking for products based on ingredients, specific health benefits, values (such as ethically produced) or even certifications (such as B Corp-certified). HealthPost CEO Abel Butler explains, “There’s a lot of nuance to the indexing needed to serve relevant results based on all those different behaviors and ways that people search.”
The company’s existing search solution struggled to satisfy shoppers’ intent, and manual merchandising was extremely time-consuming. As the Group continued to grow, the team needed a smarter way to optimize search, streamline merchandising, and personalize recommendations—without adding complexity to their workflow.
Additionally, Abel knew interoperability and integration capability were crucial aspects of building out the ecommerce tech stack across Shopify and BigCommerce sites. Moustache Republic, the ecommerce agency Abel had an ongoing relationship with, was very familiar with Searchspring and recommended it to solve the Group’s challenges.
The Solutions
The Group found the perfect remedy in Searchspring’s comprehensive search, merchandising, and ecommerce personalization capabilities to enhance the on-site shopping experience.
Abel elaborates, “With all the functionality we needed to meet core business needs, a BigCommerce integration for HealthPost, Shopify for Flora & Fauna and Nourished Life, and a recommendation from our development agency, Moustache Republic, Searchspring really ticked all the boxes. It supported all the sophisticated merchandising activities we do. The ease of use and user-friendly interface were also attractive differentiators. Our previous technology had a significant layer of complexity, so we wanted a solution where we didn’t need to refer to the vendor or to our development partners to manage effectively.”
During implementation, tech partnerships played a “really integral part in the business group’s success,” as Abel puts it. Flora & Fauna, previously on a legacy site, needed a completely new Shopify website build. Moustache Republic worked closely with Searchspring to coordinate embedding the new website with Searchspring’s class-leading search, merchandising, and personalization available at launch.
“It’s a testament to the strong relationship between Moustache Republic and Searchspring. We didn’t need to arbitrate or act as intermediaries. They worked closely together and on our behalf as well, which made everything easier,” says Abel.
System usability was another advantage of Searchspring. Particularly when managing two ecommerce platforms (BigCommerce and Shopify) across three sites, the team needed an intuitive solution that was easy to use. Tineke says, “We had used other platforms that were quite complicated. So, the Searchspring offering that was straightforward and all in the same place was very helpful.”
The level of ongoing support was also a pleasant surprise for Group Ecommerce Manager Tineke Simpson. “The support and account management we’ve experienced with Searchspring has also been incredibly positive. They’re there when you need them,” says Tineke. “Our Account Manager, Jacinda, really knows the platform, helps us with any tweaks, and also helps us understand how to get the most out of Searchspring.”
In terms of functionality, Searchspring’s advanced search features mean shoppers now receive hyper-relevant results, even when using alternative terms, misspellings, or ingredient names. “Customers don’t always search by product name,” says Abel. “They also look for ingredients, certifications, health priorities, the list goes on. Searchspring helps us speak our customer’s language on-site and quickly match their queries with the right products.”
Tineke is also excited to eliminate hours of previously manual merchandising across the Group’s brands. With Searchspring’s automated, rules-based merchandising, she can dynamically promote or demote in-stock items, high-margin products, best-sellers, and more. “The merchandising for us is phenomenal,” remarks Tineke, “It’s been really beneficial, and the team is working with it daily with promos and elevating and boosting products.”
Automated merchandising has also made short work of promotional landing pages. Tineke illustrates, “We have a lot of emails leading customers to specific landing pages. Searchspring has really enhanced our ability to create one-off landing pages using automated merchandising. Instead of setting everything up one-by-one, which is extremely time inefficient, we’re letting the tech do the heavy lifting to set up landing pages for promos.”
To better understand customers’ search behaviors, the Group uses zero-results search term reports. Tineke says the search reports have been vital to understanding which searches are successfully driving conversion and which need to be further optimized. She can quickly see what customers are looking for but can’t find, and use these invaluable insights to identify potential inventory gaps and guide future product expansion. For example, customers may search for product content, including terms like “protein,” “vitamin B12,” or specific ingredients. Tineke explains, “Just knowing we might be missing some of the range or should be onboarding other products when customers are looking for something we don’t have is really informative.”
Zero-results pages and product display pages (PDPs) also showcase personalized product recommendations. “More ideas” and “You might also like” item carousels make it easy for shoppers to discover more of what they’ll love at critical points in the shopping journey—and keep adding to their baskets. HealthPost has seen this behavior first-hand with a 6.03% conversion rate on zero-results page product recommendations since implementing Searchspring.
The Results
The impact of Searchspring has been nothing short of transformative. Impressive figures seen post-implementation include:
- 76% of revenue comes from site visits with search, with a search conversion of 24%
- A healthy 20% increase in AOV from search-driven sessions
- Over 10% conversion rate on cart cross-sells using personalized product recommendations
- A remarkable 1039% increase in conversion rate from visits with search vs. without search
- A massive 1264% higher revenue per visit from search vs. without search, thanks to enhanced search and personalized recommendations
Beyond the numbers, Searchspring has allowed the Group to create seamless shopping experiences that nurture customers throughout their buying journeys.
The Group was also an early adopter of Searchspring’s Product Bundling solution, which Abel says has already driven remarkable incremental revenue and increases in average order value (AOV). HealthPost has seen an impressive 6.97% click-through rate (CTR) on product-page bundles.
Looking forward, Abel and Tineke are keen to leverage key updates to the Searchspring and Klaviyo integration. The additional customer profile tagging options will enable Klaviyo’s marketing automation platform to use observed shopping behaviors from Searchspring for deeper segmentation and targeting across email and other campaigns. On-site, shoppers gain a better browse, search, and product discovery experience, followed up with more relevant, personalized communications that encourage reconversion.
With Searchspring deeply embedded in its ecommerce strategy, HealthPost, Flora & Fauna, and Nourished Life are poised for even greater success—delivering seamless, personalized, and value-driven shopping experiences for their customers.
Abel Butler
