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~ specialist bike retailer sees a two-fold improvement in relevancy of product merchandising for its visitors ~
Brief/Challenge
Evans Cycles has long had a web presence to complement its chain of high-street stores, but today it is looking to drive up online sales and attract more customers to its web store. Any spike in site visitors traffic needs to translate into sales. “Around 20 per cent of our sales are through e-commerce and we are experiencing strong revenue growth online. The integration of online and offline sales is what differentiates Evans from competiton," says Ben Hart, head of e-commerce and marketing for Evans Cycles. "The cycle-buying process is complex as a lot of decisions have to be made and we have different types of users with different needs. Some will use the site for research and come into stores armed with information. Others will look at products online, but want to talk to an expert, while those who know a lot about cycling will make their purchases online," says Hart.
Strategy/Execution
While the site already had an onsite search engine plugged in, this was quite rudimentary. Offering nothing more than an exact word match, it lacked the functionality consumers now expect. Having identified the limitation through internal testing, the retailer tasked Ominor, its external web development team, with finding and implementing a more intuitive function to simply plug-in. And so after careful evaluation of possible solutions, in early 2009 Evans Cycles implemented behavioral merchandising solutions from Avail Intelligence on its eCommerce site that uses information on the collective behavior of all its visitors to tailor the content to each individual visitor in all major touchpoints across the site; Using fuzzy logic and analysis of collective user searching behaviours, the site's search function can now return relevant results even in the event of spelling mistakes or based on automatic synonym lookup. Second, using analysis of past collective search and buying behaviours, visitors are also given personalised product recommendations based on their searches. Evanscycles.com has also introduced behaviourally personalised 'people like you' suggestions to all visitors on product pages and the shopping cart page, where shoppers' past buying behaviour is used to shape future recommendations for other customers with a similar profile. These product suggestions become more and more relevant as visitors browse and shop the site and helps visitors quickly find complementary products they perhaps didn't even know they were looking for, and helping to improve average order values.
Results
The new functionality has had an immediate and measurable impact on Evanscycles.com. ‘In search’ refinements dropped overnight, halving to nine per cent suggesting recommendations were more in line with shopper expectations.
“Implementing Avail has been one of our biggest improvements to Evanscycles.com since we went live with our new site last year,” said Tom Francis, website manager for Evans Cycles. “We are now able to efficiently find and present exactly what our customers want, helpings them to identify goods to purchase in three clicks, no matter where they are on the site.”
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