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How SwimOutlet Increased Conversion Rate and Revenue with Constructor

+3.68 %
revenue per visitor
Industry
Swimwear
Headquarters
Campbell, California, USA
Solutions
Search, Autosuggest, Browse, Recommendations
+3.68 %
revenue per visitor
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About SwimOutlet

SwimOutlet is the largest online specialty store for swimming, active recreation, triathlon, beach, and water sports in North America.

With over 25 million swimsuits sold to date, they are the premier online destination for all things swim.

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SwimOutlet_Logo-1024x535
SwimOutlet_Logo-1024x535

With over 25 million swimsuits sold to date, they are the premier online destination for all things swim.

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The Challenge

SwimOutlet had previously been on Algolia, but found both that search and browse results were subpar and that they were lacking insights into search and browse performance—a significant issue for an ecommerce site with 20,000+ SKUs.

“There were a lot of search queries that just provided erroneous results, and Algolia really lacked the tools to empower our merchandisers."

“We had no CSM support whatsoever to answer our ecommerce-specific questions. It just wasn’t built for ecommerce, and we were lacking the key insights that we needed to be able to take action. We didn’t know when to add synonyms for high-frequency search terms or when to optimize for conversion rates. We knew that search was a high-intent channel used by 15% of our customers, but we had difficulties optimizing for it. That was definitely a problem.”
Alexander Sienkiewicz
Chief Marketing Officer, SwimOutlet
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In addition to issues with Algolia’s search, SwimOutlet needed a solution to provide browsing visitors with a more dynamic experience on category pages. 

Their facets had previously been hard-coded into their system and didn’t change dynamically based on the context. Sienkiewicz recalls, “We weren’t able to look at the data to see which facets mattered more than others. As a result, for many categories there were facets that were ranked much lower than they should have been.”

The Solution

Choosing a Product Discovery Partner

When evaluating vendors, Constructor stood out early on in the process for the SwimOutlet team.

Instead of being based on decades-old software that can return erroneous results for products, Constructor is built with ecommerce-specific AI and natural language processing from the ground up. Constructor’s holistic platform also means that individual customer behaviors like search queries, clicks, add-to-cart actions, and purchases can dynamically personalize the experience across the rest of the site—in real time.

swimoutlet second banner

“What we liked about Constructor was that it had been taking on some pretty big ecommerce brands,” says Sienkiewicz. “The fact that this product focused specifically on ecommerce and had a different approach really stood out. We also really liked the leadership team and what felt like a really good support team, which for us is extremely valuable. The fact that we have access to a Slack channel for questions is something we value quite a bit.”

Constructor’s dedicated ecommerce focus and continuous research and development also means that solving ecommerce problems is at the forefront of the product roadmap—something else that stood out to SwimOutlet.

“No one at Algolia says, ‘Hey, we want to help you drive the best results,’ whereas we can see that Constructor is focused on helping us drive incremental revenue. That’s a breath of fresh air.”

 

The Results

In addition to significant quantitative lifts over Algolia, Constructor has helped empower the SwimOutlet team to take merchandising actions with confidence.

They can now boost and slot products and brands they’re excited about and actually get feedback on the results and effectiveness of those actions.


This empowerment comes in part from consistent support from Constructor’s customer success team—not only to answer questions, but to surface opportunities to further optimize and drive revenue.

+3.33 %
in conversion rate
+3.68 %
in site revenue per visitor

One way this has played out is more easily surfacing information that affects business outcomes. 

“We had a swimwear brand that had an extremely high search frequency on our site,” explains Sienkiewicz. “We didn’t carry it before we had Constructor. Algolia had that information too, but it wasn’t clear how the search was trending because it was hard to find. And it was very clear after looking at the Constructor data that we absolutely needed to carry this line. Anyone on the team could see that.”

swimsuits-1024x909
swimsuits-1024x909

One way this has played out is more easily surfacing information that affects business outcomes. 

“We had a swimwear brand that had an extremely high search frequency on our site,” explains Sienkiewicz. “We didn’t carry it before we had Constructor. Algolia had that information too, but it wasn’t clear how the search was trending because it was hard to find. And it was very clear after looking at the Constructor data that we absolutely needed to carry this line. Anyone on the team could see that.”

Conclusion

Making Waves

With a high-performing product discovery experience, SwimOutlet can now focus on other ways to drive revenue and profit throughout their site.

 

With rising acquisition costs across all channels, Sienkiewicz maintains that it’s imperative for SwimOutlet (and all retail brands) to maximize the impact of their existing traffic by improving the purchasing experience. The retailer has recently begun testing new features, including a very prominent search bar that continued to increase revenue per visitor.

search-bar-1024x109

With their new ability to gain insights and experiment with confidence, SwimOutlet now has everything they need for continued success.

 

“My team has so much flexibility within Constructor that we didn’t have before,” Sienkiewicz says. “We’re able to get the data they need within the dashboard, and then combine that with what we know about the business to make effective merchandising decisions.”

Is there room for improvement with your current search vendor?​ Find out.

Reach out to a Constructor Product Discovery Specialist to learn how our testing helps surface gaps so you can make a data-driven assessment.

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