Saint Bernard Automates Online Merchandising for Big Results
Online merchandising (i.e., the art of displaying products or offers on a website with the goal of increasing sales) is an important part of any brand’s overall e-commerce strategy. Presenting products in an organized yet visually appealing way will entice site visitors to click on products, increasing the likelihood of a sale.
However, merchandising teams are often busy with other duties, like analyzing data and preparing inventory buys for the next season. These tasks can get in the way of merchandisers working on site aesthetics. Saint Bernard, a fashion and lifestyle brand with roots in snow sports, is automating certain merchandising tasks with the help of the SearchSpring platform.
“We used it [SearchSpring's platform] originally to overcome the weakness of the native search in Magento, our e-comerce platform,” explains Charlie Goyer, COO of Saint Bernard.
Goyer says that he's seen many business benefits after implementing SearchSpring for native search functionality, as well as the company’s category pages. Those benefits include the following:
- it's quicker and easier to make a page look aesthetically pleasing;
- it's Quicker to merchandise a page and make it shoppable; and
- any changes needed are quick and simple to make.
“We're able to take a category page, brand page or search page and order the products however we want,” says Goyer. “We can boost products based on brand or price or how long we’ve had it.”
When shopping online, three out of four consumers don't even bother scrolling past the first page of search results, according to data from the Search Engine Journal. Getting the right results on the first page of your customers' search queries will help move products — and if the merchandising team can control what products are seen first, they can control inventory.
Big Results
Saint Bernard has seen some impressive results since implementing SearchSpring on its e-commerce site:
- a 30 percent lift in conversion rate;
- units per order increased 10 percent; and
- average order value is up 20 percent.
Not only has SearchSpring's platform helped Saint Bernard improve the profitability of its site, but its automation capabilities have yielded a significant boost in the merchandising team’s morale.
