Case study: How To Optimize The Boost App In a 20K Product Store And Gain $280K+

Jun 7, 2024

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3 min read

About SES Direct

SES Direct is a renowned provider of top-notch spare parts and accessories for outdoor power equipment in New Zealand. With an expansive inventory boasting over 10,000 spare parts, the company is steadfast in delivering customers a seamless, secure, and competitively priced shopping journey.

Nestled in Invercargill, SES Direct extends its services to customers nationwide, with more than 90% of sales being dispatched across the country. The company prides itself on its rapid turnaround times, ensuring nearly all parts are shipped within 1-2 days of purchase. A commitment to constantly expanding its parts catalog underscores SES Direct's mission to make its comprehensive inventory accessible online for customer convenience.

With such a vast inventory, the online store of SES Direct requires an intuitive and user-friendly product filter and search app for Shopify stores to ensure their shoppers have a smooth experience on-site. That's why they use Boost AI Search & Discovery. Let's discover how the store amplifies online product discovery and gained $281,829 sales generated by Boost within 90 days.

How SES Direct Ltd Utilizes Boost

Enhancing Storefront Search

SES Direct elevates the user experience by customizing the placeholder text to "Search entire store". This clearly delineates the scope of the search engine and distinguishes it from the In-collection search placeholder.

The placeholder text on the search bar clearly shows the search scope so online customers won't confuse the sitewide search and the in-collection search.

Implementing a two-column layout for the instant search widget, the online store offers Categories, Popular Suggestions, and Blogs & Pages in one column. The other column showcases suggested products with images, SKUs, vendors, original prices, and sale prices. The predictive search dropdown shows a variety of results to match the search intent of different visitors.

Search as you type with the Instant search dropdown by Boost. Still, some products without images look out of place and shoppers need to scroll down to see the suggested Blogs and Pages.

However, some products are missing the thumbnails, making them look like errors in the instant search widget. Also, there are quite many suggested categories and popular suggestions. Therefore, searchers won't be able to see the Blogs and Pages results without scrolling.

BOOST'S SUGGESTION

To enhance visual consistency, SES Direct should address products lacking thumbnails in the instant search widget through image updates or Boost's merchandising feature. Our merchandising allows users to Demote or Hide products by attributes like Tags, Vendors, Options, Variants, etc. The most flexible way is to add a tag for all products without thumbnails and set a Merchandising rule to push them further on the search results. This helps you show the best offerings on top positions.

Use Boost's Merchandising feature to re-order the product list.

Optimization of suggested categories and popular suggestions is recommended to streamline the instant search experience. Potentially, you can cap them at three maximum, so all result types are displayed within one viewport.

Another way to keep the large number of suggested items is to use a full-width search layout. This option has more space; hence, customers can see all the suggested results without scrolling. Changing the Layout settings of the Instant search widget won't affect the mobile layout, as the mobile version depends your theme. Protein Package is a success story of Boost that uses a full-width search layout.

Search box onclick is another feature that SES Direct utilize more. Currently, the Instant search dropdown displays recent searches after shoppers play around with search functions. This means new visitors won't see the onclick suggestions as they haven't done any searches.

With the Search box onclick feature of Boost, users can also enable search term suggestions and popular products. It will guide the site searchers to certain items and terms right when they land on the search bar, even if they haven't searched the online store.

Boost's robust search engine accommodates efficient searches encompassing various attributes, even accommodating alphanumeric queries enriched with special characters.

Boost’s search engine helps visitors search by product names, vendors, SKUs, and many other attributes. When inputting alphanumeric search queries with special characters, the storefront search backed by Boost can still retrieve relevant results within milliseconds.

The event of no search results is transformed into a user-friendly experience by SES Direct, with a customized message and Popular Searches display. This helps avoid the "No products found" deadlock and offers something for the customers to explore more.

BOOST'S SUGGESTION

To make the “No results" search experience more consistent, SES Direct can also customize the No search result suggestions to match the No result search page.

Boost users can customize both No search result suggestions and Search page without results.

“No results" pages in SES Direct after utilizing Search page without results feature of Boost.

Optimizing Product Filters and Sorting Options

SES Direct places product filters on the collection and search pages' left side. The online store curates filters to align with the specific products within each collection.

Leveraging Boost's intuitive product filters, the online store showcases item counts and emphasizes active filter options, enabling shoppers to fine-tune their search effortlessly. Highlighting selected filter option values offers clarity, with easy removal of individual filters, augmented by a "Clear All" button for complete resets. There are two ways to remove active filters individually, clicking the “X" mark in the “Refine By” area or clicking “Clear" in the filter options.

There are various sorting options such as Best Selling, Newest Products, Relevance, and Price on collection and search result pages. Changing the Sort type helps quickly update product listing pages based on one criterion.

BOOST'S SUGGESTION

With an exponential number of products, vendors, and specifications, SES Direct usually has a long list of filter option values. Many industry-specific filter names might be difficult for regular shoppers to understand fully. In these cases, Boost's users can choose to display a tooltip and show a Search box in the filter.

Further optimization possibilities involve incorporating a search box within filters for swift value selection and providing tooltips for complex filter terminologies.

Comment from Ryan, eCommerce Specialist at SES Direct: “We have added the search box to our default filter search tree, this is great as we have thousands of products, and customers no longer have to scroll down.”

Also, Boost has released Collection Merchandising which allows users to re-arrange the product order on collections. For example: pinning or boosting items on sale, demoting or hiding the out-of-stock.

Increasing AOV With Product Recommendation

"Frequently Bought Together" product recommendations powered by Boost's AI-driven model grace product pages of SES Direct.

Harnessing AI technology, Boost generates relevant recommendations that not only bolster average order value but also simplify shoppers' addition of recommended products to their carts. The bundle display makes it easy for online customers to all or some recommended products with the main products to cart.

Frequently Bought Together recommendation model of Boost employs AI/ML technologies to generate recommended products. This feature saves time for store owners as they no longer need to add recommended products manually. The AI-powered recommendation system guarantees that the suggested products are relevant and current, as the model is consistently trained with the latest data.

BOOST'S SUGGESTION

Boost's product recommendation offers up to 8 recommendation types:

Newest Arrivals
Bestsellers
Recently Viewed
Trending Products
Most Viewed
Related Items (with 3 sub-models: Alternative products, Complimentary products, and mix)
Hand-picked Products

and can be used on 4 pages:

Homepage
Product Pages
Collection Pages
Cart Pages

SES Direct and all Boost users can test various models on different pages. The Analytics feature will be a helping hand in analyzing the performance of different recommendation widgets on various positions. This will allow users to make informed decisions on which types to use after conducting testing.

Some Results Boost Has Brought To SES Direct

In a 90-day period from June to August 2023, Boost AI Search & Discovery has generated $281,829 in sales for SES Direct. On average, a visitor who uses the site search powered by Boost spends a whopping amount of $76. The conversion rate on Collection pages reached 1.83%.

Total Revenue Generated by Boost

$281,829

Total Revenue From Search

$230,327

Total Revenue From Collections

$51,502

Conversion Rate of Collection pages

1.83%

Total Searches

110,248

Revenue Per Visitor

$25

Revenue Per Visitor Of Search

$76

In July 2023, the total revenue from the Boost app was almost $95,000 and conversion rate of collections surpassed 2%. Such incredible numbers!

SES Direct installed Boost back in 2017 when we were still a search and filter app. Now, it has evolved into a product discovery solution with new merchandising and product recommendation. We are happy that SES Direct is making full use of them all.

If you want to have an excellent experience and a fruitful result as SES Direct, install Boost AI Search & Discovery today and try the app for FREE!.

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Ellie Ho

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Content Marketing Specialist

October 15, 2024

•

6 min read

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Case study: How To Optimize The Boost App In a 20K Product Store And Gain $280K+

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