Success Story: Shade Station & Search
‘Our conversion rate of visitors using site search is up 50.20% and revenue from those visitors is up 54.78%!’
About Shade Station
Shade Station is a UK-based designer sunglass, prescription optics and watches retailer. The company’s USP is that they have their own optical lab on-site, meaning they can glaze chosen frames in any prescription and have them with their customers the next day rather than having to wait the usual 5-7 days for online retailers. Shade Station has 3 brands (Shade Station, Glasses Station and Total Watches) each with websites in 37 countries.
Search is currently being used on www.shadestation.co.uk, au.shadestation.com and us.shadestation.com. Shade Station is the main brand and as such gets the highest traffic levels. Initially, they wanted to set up Spotler Activate’s search engine within the UK site to test its effectiveness and have since rolled it out to the US and Australian sites too, as these also receive significant enough traffic to warrant the investment.
‘Our search is now lightning fast and brings results that speak for themselves.’
– Jon Walden, Online Consultant Shade Station
Jon Walden, Online Consultant Shade Station
‘I work as a consultant for Shade Station and look after all their online systems (websites, warehousing, epos) – I built them originally back in 2005 and have been working on them for Shade Station since. I’m regularly over in the Netherlands for another business I own, so working with Spotler Activate – a Dutch company – on this was really easy. I was able to come into their office and speak to the team when we were initially considering what to do.’
Remarkable Findings
‘The implementation was really simple. As with any new system, it took a bit of trial and error to get used to how to tag our data and set up our filters within the control panel, but now we’re used to it, it’s easy to use. I had a great experience with the Spotler Activate support team, as once I’d raised a ticket they acted directly so everything displayed exactly how we would want it to. The insights into our queries without results were surprising: a lot of people were misspelling our key brands – previously this would have brought up 0 results. With this search functionality however, the search realises what our customers are intending so we can show them our full collection and they actually find what they are looking for.’
‘Spotler Activate has great aftercare – the support team is very knowledgeable and quick to sort out any issue.’
– Jon Walden, Online Consultant Shade Station
Why use this Search solution?
‘In the first month after implementing Search (compared to the same month in the previous year), we had a 33.53% increase in conversion rate from visitors that used site search. This led to a 48.26% increase in revenue from visitors using our search. Since that first month we’ve refined our search engine further by adding more filters, tags etc… and if I look at the period since we went live with the tool (compared to the previous year over the same period – September 1 – March 10, versus same period previous year) our conversion rate of visitors using site search is up 50.20% and revenue from those visitors is up 54.78%!
Before Search from Spotler Activate we used our own search we built into the website – it couldn’t find close match products and was much, much slower than using Search. Often results pages could take several moments to appear. Using this module means our visitors get accurate results immediately and it’s showing in the massive increases we’ve had in conversion rates from those visitors.
The great thing about Search is the ease of implementation. We received some great aftercare from the support team. They are very knowledgeable and quick to sort any issues out. Our search is now lightning fast and brings results that speak for themselves. I would highly recommend this solution to others – I’ve already recommended to several people I know who’ve been on the lookout for a better search experience on their site.’
Also want to become successful?
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