Everywine.co.uk is the internet’s largest online wine retailer, with 36,000 wines available from 26 countries. Up until 6 months ago, Everywine had operated on a number of search platforms. Due to increasing product growth and site traffic, Everywine discovered they needed an intelligent on-site search solution to effectively manage the huge range of wines to meet the search needs of their growing customer base-of which their existing search solution could not achieve.
Targeting customers of all wine preferences to suit all budgets, Everywine segment their product offering into three categories: everyday wines, hard to find wines and fine wines. Their core market is ‘hard to find’ wines; usually wines that one has tasted in a restaurant or a hotel, and are not generally available at the supermarket or local wine merchant. The nature of this type of wine brings challenges in a search query. For example, remembering the name of the wine, and the spelling of a foreign wine can be very complex. Another challenge was recognizing repeat customers and new customers and the issues that come with each in search.
Everywine.co.uk were looking for a site search that could effectively manage the search queries of their customers by:
- Producing fast and accurate search results
- Flexibility and intelligence in search results to cater to all types of customers to ensure a purchase
- Control over search results and performance
- Increase conversion rates
- Increase the average spend per customer
- Increase SEO performance
- Optimise the site’s performance as a whole
- Maximum value for money
- Easy implementation
Strategy and execution
1. Everywine needed the ability to give their customers quick and accurate search results when seeking a ‘hard to find’ wine. Locayta’s ‘auto-complete’ functionality provided the predictive text needed to achieve this. With 36,000 products to choose from, Everywine needed to increase search result performance even further. Using Locayta’s intelligent guided navigation functionality and Control Panel, data across the entire product mix was made consistent with search ‘facets’, including colour, country, region, grape and bottle size.
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2. Another business challenge was the need for flexibility within search results. Everywine sells by the case, and site traffic indicated new customers coming from Google in search for a generic wine term were not converting. Typically, this customer did not want to buy 12 bottles of the same wine, resulting in cart abandonment. To increase their conversion rates, Locayta Search enabled the identification of this type of Google customer, with its behavioural merchandising intelligence, automatically offering single bottle wines within the search results. Based on search rules that push single bottle wines to the top of the list for a set of defined search terms (for example: popularity and stock availability), editable by the Control panel, Everywine was able to deliver 700 single bottle wines in this customer’s search. Locayta Search’s ability to offer this type of customization and flexibility achieved a significant increase in conversion rates, with an increase of 26.21% spend during the Christmas period of 2010.
3. Everywine wanted to increase the average spend of their customers, and maximise profit. A cross sell strategy was enabled by Locayta Search, based on user behaviour in real-time. Specifically, the option to purchase single bottles after a case was bought, was a very successful cross-sell strategy resulting in an increase of average spend per case by 8.6%, with per customer spend averaging significantly higher.
4. SEO was a significant factor to increase Everywine’s site ranking on the likes of Google to increase organic search visitor traffic to the site. Locayta Search SEO page Builder, enabled Everywine’s search result pages from the most relevant customer searches to be presented to Internet search engines for indexing. Consequently, visitor numbers were up by 20.57% during the Christmas trading period of 2010. Not only does SEO page builder apply to the internet’s search engines, but the search data is also indexed by the Everywine Site itself, creating more intelligent navigation functionality via links in Everywine’s web page footer.
5. Locayta Search is integrated within Locayta’s online merchandising solution, Locayta ESP. Riding off the success of Locayta Search, Everywine decided to enable Locayta ESP’s visual merchandising functionality. To optimise the site’s performance and increase conversion rates further, Locayta’s Visual merchandising tool enabled Everywine to implement targeted banner advertising within their site, showing users offers that are specific to the type of wine they are looking for. In addition, zones were created, containing the top selling wines within a category the customer is currently viewing.
6. Locayta was the cheapest supplier out of those who were bidding. Locayta also provided intelligent search functionality and a user friendly control panel that other suppliers could not deliver.
7. Easy implementation- the integration of Locayta Search and Locayta ESP is very light touch and does not require experienced developers to enable integration. All the complexity of the search engine integration is hidden from the developer using a simple API and all the complexity of the search engine configuration is hidden from the client using the simple interface of the Locayta’s control panel. Results
Clearly the Locayta platform represents the majority of the everywine.co.uk customer facing functionality. This includes: - SEO - getting customers to the site
- Search - finding their wine products quickly
- Browse - allowing customer to narrow their search's simply and quickly
- Merchandising - cross-sells, down-sells of everyday drinking wines, special offers and features
Based on this and the figures above, the ROI has been significant with: - Average visitors per day increasing by 81.26%
- Increases of conversion rates with spend increase of 26.21% over the Christmas 2010 trading period.
- Average spend per case has increased by 8.6%, with Locayta Cross Sell functionality
- Site sales increased by 11.13% within a month when Locayta Search SEO and merchandising functionality was implemented.
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