“Searchspring has made it easier for customers to find what they want, it’s made it quicker for customers to get to those products, and in turn, it’s improved our conversion rate. It’s also made my life a heck of a lot easier.”
Marshall Jones
Head of Ecommerce, The Oodie
The Brand
What started in 2018 with the idea of a wearable blanket has become a runaway Australian success story. The company’s signature ‘Oodie’ product combines the comfort of a cosy blanket with wearable practicality, bringing the most snuggly wear and countless smiles to its customers.
The Oodie has amassed a cult-like following amongst its 3 million+ customers and has worked with big-name brands like Disney, Warner Brothers, Marvel, DC Comics, AFL, and more. The company has also expanded into Sleep Tees, Dressing Gowns, Pyjamas, and Slippers, with more exciting products on the way.
The Challenges
Manual merchandising processes were slowing things down for Marshall and his team. The Oodie, operating across 9 regions, wanted to improve merchandising efficiency and cut down manual workload so the team could focus on revenue-generating improvements to the site.
Additionally, shoppers’ product search queries were often misspelt or used slightly different terms to product descriptions and were holding back the onsite experience.
Marshall Jones, Head of Ecommerce at The Oodie, came across the search, merchandising, and personalisation platform, Searchspring. Marshall comments, “Without Searchspring, we were manually merchandising each of our collections across our 9 regions. That process included defining our sold-out products and moving them to the bottom of collections, then defining our top sellers and moving them up. Doing that at least once every few days was unnecessarily time-consuming.”
The Solutions
The complete feature set across search, merchandising, and personalisation, along with the industry reputation of Searchspring, made it a clear front-runner over competing solutions.
The simplicity of Searchspring’s pricing also added to the appeal. Marshall wanted a transparent, consistent pricing model that wouldn’t change if The Oodie saw significant traffic changes throughout peak periods, and Searchspring delivered this up-front.
One of the included Searchspring features Marshall says he couldn’t live without is automated merchandising, which has saved the team around 10 hours per week. Marshall comments, “When you have multiple collections, merchandising manually gets incredibly time-consuming. Having global rules that allow you to merchandise your collection landing pages within a few clicks has not only saved us so much time; it’s made it a lot easier for customers to find what they want. We can now effortlessly ensure sold-out products aren’t appearing at the top of the page, which we had to do manually in the past.”
Global merchandising rules also accelerate processes across all regions, automatically promoting best-selling products to the top of search results and collection pages while demoting sold-out items. Marshall explains, “Where it really comes into its own is during sales periods. We use product tags a lot to define our sale items. We can now automatically merchandise items based on those tags and easily roll out that logic across different regions. That’s been really beneficial for us.”
Search synonyms also enable The Oodie to constantly refine the search experience. Search term reports reveal words with similar or interchangeable meanings. Those terms are then added as synonyms to return more relevant results each time a shopper searches – regardless of the terms they use.
“We can see what people are searching for. If there’s a term people are using in their searches that’s not quite the right word, we can put in a synonym and easily get shoppers to the right products,” says Marshall.
The Results
The Oodie has seen a substantial impact on revenue and conversion attributed to Searchspring’s onsite search functionality, implemented on 5 of its 9 sites. From FY22 to FY23, The Oodie’s portion of search-attributed revenue grew by an incredible 43%. Conversions from search were also a whopping 156% higher in FY23 compared to conversions without search.
Searchspring’s intelligent search functionality has also guided product decisions and website structuring. By using a data-led approach, The Oodie can more accurately anticipate customer needs and enrich its product strategy.
Marshall shares, “The insights we gain from keyword search data give us a better understanding of what customers want. We can see how customers are using the search bar to find certain products. We then take that information to our product team and get something built that meets our customers’ needs. Before Searchspring, we didn’t have that visibility. Now, we’re making significant site improvements, and the biggest of those is putting new products on the site that we know our customers want.”
Additionally, Marshall and the team have pushed the envelope of what can be done with A/B testing, including custom buttons, different appearances based on traffic, and split traffic testing on various aspects of the landing page and collection pages. Marshall details, “We’ve tested quick add-to-carts from collection pages that are powered by Searchspring, different image dimensions, product descriptions, how we display pricing, etc. Basically, we want to A/B test every aspect of collection and product cards appearing on our landing page to continually optimise our conversion rate.”
Not only has Searchspring enhanced the visibility of customer needs, it also enables The Oodie to make continuous website improvements that increase conversions.
