Australian retailer Icon by Design integrates full Merchandising Cloud suite on Neto-powered furniture store
The Challenge
It may currently be an overly consumer-driven world, but an ever-growing number of businesses are taking a stand against the modern-day throw-away culture. Icon by Design is one of them.
The company, which is based in Australia, sells forever furniture – items based on Nordic and Scandinavian designs that will last you a lifetime.
“In our rush for convenience and efficiency, everything has become disposable. Electronics, toys, clothes, furniture. Oh, they’re all great value, on the sticker price. But at what cost?” they ask.
“At Icon by Design, we don’t think we should spend our brief time on earth making disposable things. So we build our furniture to last a long time, with a focus on natural, sustainable materials and craftsmanship. And we design our furniture to be minimal, elegant and timeless.”
The Solution
Forever tech for the forever furniture company
The latest step in Icon by Design’s admirable journey lies in its recent integration of Merchandising Cloud’s site search and personalization software solutions.
Merchandising Cloud’s full suite of Personalized Search, Recommendations, and Smart Collections is now live on Icon by Design’s website (which is hosted on the Neto platform), helping customers of the store find their preferred items quicker and easier.
The autocomplete function, which forms part of the Personalized Search solution, in operation for Icon by Design.
How does Site Search and Personalization software work?
With Personalized Search, there are two aspects – search accuracy and personalization.
Accuracy is about making the search as smart as possible so that it can return relevant results to the customer putting in the query. This includes an autocomplete, predicting what they will type as they’re typing, meaning fewer keystrokes for the user.
Other aspects include Natural Language Processing – the search being able to tell the difference between products, like a table, a chair, or a sideboard, and attributes, like the colour red.
An effective search should also include spelling tolerance, ensuring customers get relevant results even if they make a typo, and a zero results workaround – ensuring relevant products come up even if the exact query searched for is not present.
Personalization, then, is all about the AI algorithm which analyzes the behaviour of the customer and learns, in real time, what their preferences are – search results are ranked in order of preference. So, if the algorithm learns the shopper has a preference for items made out of oak, or has a preference for a certain style of furniture, this is what they will see more of.
Merchandising Cloud’s Recommendations solution also draws on these learnings, but in order to increase upsell and cross-sell capabilities – using designated space to highlight products the shopper is most likely to buy.
Smart Collections, then, takes all the same aspects as Personalized Search and applies them to collection pages to ensure products appearing within collections are ranked according to the customer’s preference, and are not simply a one-size-fits-all static list of products.
The Results
Customizing the product experience
While Merchandising Cloud’s powerful ecommerce tool already looks great out-of-the-box, it is also possible to customize the solutions to match the merchant’s desired look, feel, and desired brand experience.
Icon by Design, for example, chose to customize a number of aspects, most notably in relation to the store’s product cards.
Icon by Design product cards now feature reviews (powered by Yotpo via the Merchandising Cloud <> Yotpo integration), larger images, and options to ‘Pre-order’ and ‘Save’ items.
Since Merchandising Cloud powers areas that display products across the site, the company very specifically decided to build a solution that is flexible and can be fully adapted to the client’s brand experience – offering endless opportunities through customizations and pre-built integrations.
In this case, Icon by Design also chose to customize the look and feel of the Recommendations solution.
In addition, Merchandising Cloud created custom stickers for the merchant – highlighting both ‘New’ items as well as products ‘On Sale’.
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