How home24 lifted search conversion and revenue with Constructor
About home24
home24 is a leading home living ecommerce company that has grown to over €600 million in annual revenue.
Since 2012, the company has capitalised on the major surge in home furnishings demand and offers over 150,000 product items in different styles. As the business grew rapidly, home24’s legacy solution for product search was struggling to keep up.
Since 2012, the company has capitalised on the major surge in home furnishings demand and offers over 150,000 product items in different styles. As the business grew rapidly, home24’s legacy solution for product search was struggling to keep up.
"The biggest problem we had with internal search was we were running on a limited number of fields for searchability."
"Important attributes like 'number of bulbs in a lamp' or 'a bed without a box spring' were not available within our algorithm or visible to the user."
Due to the limitations of their search solution, the team ended up manually implementing a lot of redirects to their category pages. The manual work involved ultimately became unmanageable, and users weren’t able to filter search results by specific attributes like size, style, material, colour, or price — ultimately limiting home24’s ability to transform search results into revenue growth.
"Because of business priorities, search was put in maintenance mode for a while," Gianluca says. "But we wanted to start working on it again when we started talking to Constructor."
When they re-prioritised search, the home24 team re-evaluated setting up an in-house team. After weighing the business need, they decided to invest in out-of-the-box tech built for ecommerce search instead of a team of 6-7 members (including another product manager, engineering manager, and data engineers).
After learning about emerging trends in ecommerce search, they gravitated toward Constructor. Being a highly data-driven retailer, their strictest requirement was that they needed to see realised conversion lifts via A/B tests while also saving on infrastructure—or else they wouldn’t buy.
The Solution
The Constructor Difference
Home24 opted to see Constructor’s results for themselves by putting their current website to the test.
This 2-4 week live value assessment uses real data from a prospective customer’s website to quantify the lifts that new customers can expect to see once they implement Constructor. This risk-free approach gives retailers and brands the confidence they need to invest in product search and discovery.
Once they saw the results of the Proof Schedule and verified those results in A/B testing post-implementation, home24 decided to become a long-term customer.
Init recalls home24’s experience with Constructor onboarding: "We felt well taken care of for the entire duration of testing and implementation. We were assigned a dedicated Constructor customer success manager, frontend engineer, backend engineer, and data scientist who we still work with today.”
As both Constructor and home24 use AWS for data storage, it was easy to maximise the agility of the implementation process and minimise time to market.
Both teams tested everything on staging first, and gradually launched to a full 50/50 A/B test. Over the next three weeks, they were able to train the algorithms on home24’s data and quantify the difference between Constructor and home24’s legacy search provider.
The Results
home24 is serving consistently attractive results, leading to additional revenue on top of their original lift in conversion rates.
-
Double-digit growthplus additional increases in revenue with Cognitive Embeddings Search
-
Deployment across platformsincluding all home24 websites and iOS/Android mobile applications in less than 6 months
-
Live in 7 European countriesGermany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Austria
-
Serving customers in 4 languagesGerman, French, Italian, and Dutch
Constructor’s many searchandising capabilities like autosuggest, analytics, AI-powered synonyms, and facet configurations are giving the home24 team hours back in their day.
“We saw a decline in the number of zero-results searches with Constructor’s Cognitive Embeddings Search and are now showing related products when organic results are low or zero,” Gianluca says.
What’s most exciting is that home24 has deployed Constructor across multiple regions and languages. Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™ is language agnostic, using behavioral clickstream data to rank search results and surface attractive products. Enhanced with machine learning and Natural Language Processing, it automatically identifies new relationships between words—so that as language evolves, so do the platform’s learnings.
What advice would you give someone going on the search for search?
"Never underestimate the speed-to-market of going with a solution like Constructor instead of trying to build in-house. And since testing and results matter most, go with Constructor since they're the only company that offers this.
Wonderful team training, amazing implementation, and extremely low risk for customers." — Init Khurana
What advice would you give someone going on the search for search?
"Never underestimate the speed-to-market of going with a solution like Constructor instead of trying to build in-house. And since testing and results matter most, go with Constructor since they're the only company that offers this.
Wonderful team training, amazing implementation, and extremely low risk for customers." — Init Khurana
Moving Forward
What's Next for home24?
With the success of search, home24 is excited to expand Constructor’s capabilities and spread implementation across the organisation. ‘We plan on implementing use cases for product and engineering, our commercial and marketplace sites, marketing, and more,’ says Init.
Constructor’s API-first architecture gives the home24 team plenty to play with, and ongoing white-glove support from Constructor makes anything possible.