Case Study | Google Search Appliance

Leading lifestyle retailer selects the Google eCommerce Search Solution and sees transactions and revenue soar

At a Glance What they wanted to do • Improve the overall search experience for customers • Increase conversion rates • Reduce search solution maintenance What they did • Implemented Google eCommerce Search Solution • Plan to add on the Google Searchandiser to broaden merchandising capabilities

Business Plow & Hearth is a catalog, retail and Internet company specializing in qualitybuilt, unique, enduring home and lifestyle products. What began in 1980 as a small retail store in Madison, Virginia, has expanded to include HearthSong, Magic Cabin, Wind & Weather, and Problem Solvers in addition to the flagship brand, Plow & Hearth. The five brands process over 825,000 orders a year. Challenge For a company that prides itself on providing high quality merchandise to their customers, the search solution offered by Plow & Hearth’s online properties was not measuring up to their standards. 20% of site visitors were using search, but few were purchasing products based on their search results.

What they accomplished • 86% increase in search usage on Plow & Hearth • 31% – 94% increase in transactions across all properties • 28% – 78% increase in search-attributed • revenue across all properties

The GSA for eCommerce provides highly relevant results and powerful features like Dynamic Navigation that allow for faceted searches.

In addition, maintaining the previous search solution was burdensome. “Relevance tuning and updating keywords, synonyms, and autospell manually required hundreds of hours annually,” recalls Brianne Forst, Director of eCommerce, Plow & Hearth. “We needed a better, faster way to merchandise items online. Solution In looking at eCommerce search solutions, Plow & Hearth found many of the offerings were cost prohibitive, and required a lengthy amount of time to implement and maintain.

About Google Search Appliance

With the Google Search Appliance (GSA) for eCommerce, the search experience shared by millions across the globe can be harnessed for your eCommerce site to make searching for products easier, more intuitive, and customizable. The GSA for eCommerce provides high-quality relevance right out of the box that is enhanced by incorporating shopper behavior on your site. For more information visit: www.google.com/enterprise/search Contact: [email protected]

In the end, Plow & Hearth selected the Google eCommerce Search Solution so they could have, as Forst puts it, the “brain of Google.” The solution immediately increased Plow & Hearth’s search speed, relevance, and intuitiveness for site visitors – so much so that the company made the search box a more prominent feature on the Plow & Hearth site. Visitors can now easily find the right products, and Plow & Hearth spends almost no time maintaining the technology. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) brings unparalleled relevance to the Plow & Hearth online properties, drawing from billions of search queries made on Google.com every day and from machine learning based on customer behavior on their own sites. The GSA for eCommerce indexes products within minutes of the SKU’s being uploaded into the system, handles robust data sets, and allows Plow & Hearth greater agility to modify and adjust the code base and data feeds to suit their marketing needs.

“The Google eCommerce Search Solution has been unbelievably relevant, flexible, and easy-to-use. It gives us a wide variety of ways to improve site profitability” —Brianne Forst, Director of Ecommerce “The Google Search Appliance does an amazing job with its out-of-the-box relevance,” says Forst, “but we’re really excited with how we can leverage both regular and forecasted sales data on the site to provide us more flexibility in how we market our products.” Plow & Hearth also plans to add the Searchandiser extension to the GSA for eCommerce, which will allow them to promote products with easy-to-use merchandising rules and templates that require minimal IT involvement. Specifically she appreciates how they will be able to boost relevancy for products based on region, seasonality, and product launch dates. “When there’s still snow on the ground in Virginia but it’s 70 degrees in Texas, we want to make sure the search results customers see take into consideration where they live and what season they’re in,” says Forst. Benefits Since implementing the Google eCommerce Search Solution, Plow & Hearth has seen a significant improvement in results: • 86% increase in Search usage • 31% increase in transactions • 28% increase in search attributed revenue. The other brands also saw significant surges, with Wind & Weather’s transactions increasing by 94% and their search attributed revenue by 78%. They have also realized significant savings in administration time. With their previous search solution, they staffed 1.5 employees to maintain synonyms, misspellings, and keywords, tasks that the Google eCommerce Search Solution performs automatically. “The solution paid for itself within the first six months,” Forst reports. “The Google eCommerce Search Solution has been unbelievably relevant, flexible, and easy-to-use. It gives us a wide variety of ways to improve site profitability.”

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