The Oodie

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.”

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.

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.