“Searchspring gives you the flexibility to organize your products in a way that makes sense – not only to you, but also to your buyers. It’s the most consistent platform I have seen that integrates with Magento.”

Josh South
Director of Marketing and Technology, SuperATV

The Brand

SuperATV is an off-road brand specializing in aftermarket accessories for UTVs and ATVs.

With parts stocked in over 3,000 dealerships across the U.S., the business also sells products direct-to-consumer and via Amazon and eBay marketplaces.

While now well-established across multiple channels, the brand began with a single homemade lift kit, designed by Harold Hunt for his own Polaris Sportsman. “His buddies liked it so he built some for them too,” says Josh South, Director of Marketing and Technology at SuperATV. Soon, he was selling his kits on eBay, and the business took off from there.

Over 15 years later, all parts continue to be designed, engineered, and manufactured in Madison, Indiana, and the business is still family-owned and run. “We’re not allowed to have meetings on Friday afternoons because Harold goes out riding,” says Josh. “It’s definitely a lifestyle brand, we’re enthusiasts at heart and we try to instill that in all of our employees so that they carry it over to our customers.”

The Challenges

“SuperATV’s online shopping experience has evolved considerably since the early days, and keeping up with the demands of the industry is always a challenge,” says Josh. “The machines are constantly changing, and so is the way people find products for their machines.”

More recently, the brand experienced a surge in new business during the COVID-19 outbreak, which Josh attributes to renewed consumer interest in outdoor activities. “People couldn’t go on vacation or get out and go places, so they bought off-road machines.”

Platformed on Magento, SuperATV initially relied on Elasticsearch to support their online shopping experience. “We didn’t really have a lot of success with Elasticsearch because it’s all based on weighting certain attributes within Magento,” says Josh. They progressed to InstantSearch+ but ran into issues with speed. “InstantSearch+ was slow interacting with Magento and we had a lot of problems with the data transformations back and forth between the two systems.”

With B2B sales accounting for up to half of their business, the site also needed to cater to the differing shopping needs of dealers. “Our B2B customers tend to search by product SKUs, which we couldn’t do well with InstantSearch+ because of the parent-child relationships within Magento. It was a big selling point for us that Searchspring allowed us to search for child SKUs within parent listings.”

The Solutions

“I saw some Searchspring demos and right away knew this was probably the product for us. From the capabilities to modify filtered searches, to creating merchandising campaigns, to the reporting. The primary driver for us was just the speed and consistency within the data transformations,” says Josh.

With high levels of variability in their product categories, the SuperATV team uses Searchspring to adjust the merchandising and navigation experience in each category to reflect how their customers shop. New products are released regularly, and they circumvent the traditional restrictions of sorting products by either newness or popularity with a custom approach.

“Searchspring allows us to display a mix of our popular products per category as well as newer items that don’t have a sales history. It gives us control over the search results to show the customer what we want at any given time.”

The brand also draws actionable data from the platform’s insights, particularly the zero results report. “It has driven new product development within the organization because it showed us that people were on our site looking for certain products that we didn’t have.”

The Results

“SuperATV’s average order value and search revenue have grown because more shoppers are finding relevant products, faster,” says Searchspring Customer Success Manager, Mike Masten.

“Josh achieved this by setting up rules to order the site by sales data, and by organizing filters in a way that made sense for the shopping experience. When you have more people interacting with a smarter algorithm, it empowers them (the shopper) to make a buying decision.”