Sustainable Supply
Sustainable Supply saves 10-15 hours of merchandising time a week using Searchspring.
“Our time to value with Searchspring far exceeded our expectations. We saw conversion improvements within 60 days of implementing, their focus on improving our platform’s feed generation speed and also optimizations on merchandising netted us savings of 10-15 hours per week. We see Searchspring as a true partner who can scale with us as we grow the business over the next 5-10 years"
Tyler Browne , IT Manager at Sustainable Supply
ABOUT SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY
Sustainable Supply is a B2B retailer who specializes in green and eco-friendly products. They started in 2009 with a vision and purpose of filling a void in the
industrial supply, restroom products, building materials, maintenance supplies, MRO, and safety products marketplace. Their industry is growing at over 50% year-over-year and 75% of consumers now state that they are more likely to purchase a product if it is sustainable and ecofriendly.
THE PROBLEM
Sustainable Supply deals with a common problem for B2B retailers, growing their product catalog and retail categories to meet the needs of their customers. Their product catalog surpassed 1 million products and 10 thousand attributes, making it increasingly difficult to manage. This created the main problem of simplifying and organizing filters in a frictionless manner for search and navigation.
With a catalog this large, it was very cumbersome for customers to find the right products. Their previous UI was limited in the number of filters that could be displayed and also in the intelligence displaying the filters. This created a lot of friction for customers, but also for the merchandisers in the backend who had to manually choose which filters to display.
These two pain points were severely hurting Sustainable Supply’s conversion rate and their ability to scale their catalog. Additionally, Sustainable Supply’s ecommerce platform had extreme difficulty when it came to extracting all of that product data, taking up to seven days to get everything out of the platform’s API. On that platform, a full catalog index took three hours on average, making reactive marketing a near impossibility.
“Our platform was limiting our ability to scale our product assortment, conversion rate and team effectiveness. We had tried work arounds and in-house short-term solutions, but quickly realized that we needed a partner who could help us scale both in the short and long-term” – Brian Fricano, CEO of Sustainable Supply
THE SOLUTIONS
Sustainable Supply identified Searchspring as the provider to help them solve these major issues. Searchspring’s infrastructure and algorithms are designed to scale with the needs of B2B mid-market and enterprise retailers who have large catalogs with a variety of attributes. Dynamic Filtering takes all of the manual work out of the process, and uses a machine learning algorithm to dynamically determine which filters should appear on category or search results pages.
The algorithm powering Dynamic Filtering examines the product attributes relevant to the user’s navigation and analyzes user behavior to determine which filters should appear, placing those most likely to be used at the top. This takes dozens of hours of manual work out of the equation, and simultaneously utilizes real-world data to increase conversion and reduce friction. Searchspring also brings decades of infrastructure experience to the table, and has spent the last eight years creating a scalable infrastructure able to deliver industry leading response times even for retailers with large volumes of products, attributes and traffic.
THE RESULTS
Migrating to Searchspring from their platform’s native search and category navigation offerings led to a 15% average increase in search conversion and a 10% increase in navigation conversions. Dynamic Filtering was able to streamline the user experience and also reduce friction for their customers on desktop and mobile. Additionally, Sustainable Supply saw dramatic improvements in speed due to Searchspring’s infrastructure and scaling ability. While product data extraction took seven days on their platform, it now takes just forty five minutes. Indexing time was also drastically improved as well, down from three hours to around twenty minutes. These improvements in speed allowed Sustainable Supply to be more nimble in their merchandising and marketing efforts which further led to sales increases and freed up time that their teams could leverage to drive results in other areas.
