Product discovery is one of the most important parts of a luxury, premium online shopping experience. A great product discovery strategy puts the spotlight on inspiring, relevant products that motivate shoppers to buy.
Harvey Nichols, the British luxury department store chain, has an ingrained devotion to their customers. In-store experiences are fun, accessible and exciting, and this same experience is one that the brand sought to replicate online.
As one of the most widely recognised brands in Britain, Harvey Nichols’s merchandising team spent much of their time manually curating products to create that luxury shopping feel – but this came with some downsides. For over 5,000 search queries, shoppers were directed away from the search results pages and onto generic landing pages.
While it allowed Harvey Nichols to showcase products in alignment with their merchandising strategy, it did not deliver the slick, seamless and accessible experience they–and shoppers–wanted.
By taking a new approach to their product discovery strategy, Harvey Nichols unbundled search from their broader merchandising strategy, allowing them to focus on driving results through each initiative specifically.
Adopting this new approach, and Attraqt’s Product Discovery Platform, meant that Harvey Nichols drove an additional £300,000 worth of revenue and increased online conversions by nearly a third. So, let’s see how they did it.
As a department store, Harvey Nichols’s product catalogue is vast: featuring everything from food and drink, to designer fashion and homeware. Dealing with such a large volume of products became an arduous task for the merchandising team, with the team building manually curated landing pages for search results.
This became cumbersome, with more than 5,000 redirects in place. Furthermore, every new merchandising initiative would require a review of each of these redirects, severely restricting the speed at which Harvey Nichols could move.
For shoppers, this approach was clunky. It often meant that specific searches resulted in being redirected to a generic brand category page. Although these pages aided shoppers at the very early stages of their discovery journey, shoppers with a clearer intent were met with a disjointed experience that placed a barrier between them and the products they wanted to find.
The answer, to decouple their search and merchandising strategies. Harvey Nichols came to Attraqt with a clear brief: enhance the search experience, drive more conversions but all the while giving Harvey Nichols merchandising team more power and agility to activate their strategies.
By using Attraqt’s set of search and merchandising automation tools, Harvey Nichols were able to shift to an algorithmically-enhanced merchandising approach. For the first time, Harvey Nichols could treat search and merchandising as separate entities. They could:
With an extremely diverse catalogue of products, ranging from homeware, food, wine and fashion, matching searcher’s intent with relevant products is no mean feat.
Using Attraqt’s AI-search platform with natural language processing, Harvey Nichols were able to increase the relevancy of search results, whilst taking into account merchandising initiatives fed into Attraqt by the team.
Estimated additional annual revenue driven by search
Increase in value per search
Measurable increase in search result relevance
Faster search results received by shoppers
Attraqt has fuelled Harvey Nichols’ product discovery platform to provide a sophisticated and intuitive experience for shoppers that mirrors that of their brick and mortar stores. As a result, they’ve seen significant increases to sales, conversions and site engagement.
At Attraqt, we power exceptional shopping experiences for over 300 of the world’s leading retail brands, and are equipped to cater for every possible requirement and scenario. Contact us to find out more about how you can take full control of your online merchandising and grow your business through creating an AI-powered product discovery strategy.
