drives +13% in ecommerce conversions with Constructor

drives +13% in ecommerce conversions with Constructor

INDUSTRY

Health & Wellness

HEADQUARTERS

San Diego, California, USA

SOLUTIONS

Search, Browse, Recommendations, Collections

“We’re now able to searchandise much more effectively with the advanced merchandising controls now available to us, and we love the flexibility we have to partner with the AI and to boost or bury products on our own.”
Tony Gabriele
VP Merchandising, Petco
“We’re now able to searchandise much more effectively with the advanced merchandising controls now available to us, and we love the flexibility we have to partner with the AI and to boost or bury products on our own."
Tony Gabriele
VP Merchandising, Petco

A leading pet health and wellness retailer in North America, Petco is committed to connecting people, pets, and products.

Their ecommerce site features tens of thousands of SKUs (everything from horse grooming brushes to cat carriers to fish food) and is a premier online and brick-and-mortar outlet for shoppers looking for all of their pet care needs in one place. 

It’s a big lift, and Petco needed a product discovery solution that could keep up.

A leading pet health and wellness retailer in North America, Petco is committed to connecting people, pets, and products.

Their ecommerce site features tens of thousands of SKUs (everything from horse grooming brushes to cat carriers to fish food) and is a premier online and brick-and-mortar outlet for shoppers looking for all of their pet care needs in one place. 

It’s a big lift, and Petco needed a product discovery solution that could keep up.

The Challenge

Petco had historically found that most customers tended to experience the site by browsing through category pages rather than searching for items explicitly. They also noticed that the results returned in both their browsing and searching experiences often looked irrelevant or stale, with hot new products buried.

The merchandising team was interested in increasing search usage (and search conversions), along with improving the items returned on their category pages and browse experience by providing a more intuitive and customer-focused experience, but they found that their legacy product discovery and search provider was not up to the task.

Instead of supporting state-of-the-art personalization, Petco’s previous Elasticsearch-based solution was creating more problems than it was solving — and not equipping the Petco team with the functionality they needed to solve them. This resulted in missed opportunities to convert customers and drive revenue onsite. Even worse, they needed to deal with occasional downtime.

It was clear that Petco’s next product discovery provider would need to provide a holistic, personalized experience across the entire site. It would also need the stability to handle a large volume of site traffic and conversions, regardless of macro or regional outages. 

Petco had historically found that most customers tended to experience the site by browsing through category pages rather than searching for items explicitly. They also noticed that the results returned in both their browsing and searching experiences often looked irrelevant or stale, with hot new products buried.

The merchandising team was interested in increasing search usage (and search conversions), along with improving the items returned on their category pages and browse experience by providing a more intuitive and customer-focused experience, but they found that their legacy product discovery and search provider was not up to the task.

Instead of supporting state-of-the-art personalization, Petco’s previous Elasticsearch-based solution was creating more problems than it was solving — and not equipping the Petco team with the functionality they needed to solve them. This resulted in missed opportunities to convert customers and drive revenue onsite. Even worse, they needed to deal with occasional downtime.

It was clear that Petco’s next product discovery provider would need to provide a holistic, personalized experience across the entire site. It would also need the stability to handle a large volume of site traffic and conversions, regardless of macro or regional outages. 

Constructor: Petco's Best Friend

Constructor and Petco partnered to stand up Constructor’s AI platform on Petco’s cloud provider of choice, AWS, to power Petco’s search and browse pages across the site.

Using Route 53 and AWS, Constructor’s AI has never seen downtime since Petco started to use it, allowing the Petco team to focus on delivering results. 

Petco’s previous solution was unable to personalize the entire experience sitewide because it lacked the advanced AI functionality needed to interpret customer clickstream data. They needed a product discovery partner that could take those millions of inputs, ingest them into a machine learning model, and use that model to show each individual customer the products most likely to appeal to them. 

For example, if a shopper browsing for dog food and dog toys then types “collar” into the search bar, they should see dog collars first.

With Constructor, this functionality is available right out of the box, along with the merchandising controls needed to finesse the experience. This was the final need Petco wanted Constructor to solve: gaining a clear view into how the AI works and why it ranks the way it does, and easy-to-use merchandising tools to overrule the AI where appropriate. 

Because Constructor only works with large retailers and brands like Petco, they found that Constructor’s product had truly been built for people like them and gave them the tools they needed to understand Constructor’s AI and merchandise on top of it when needed.

Constructor: Petco's Best Friend

Constructor and Petco partnered to stand up Constructor’s AI platform on Petco’s cloud provider of choice, AWS, to power Petco’s search and browse pages across the site.

Using Route 53 and AWS, Constructor’s AI has never seen downtime since Petco started to use it, allowing the Petco team to focus on delivering results. 

Petco’s previous solution was unable to personalize the entire experience sitewide because it lacked the advanced AI functionality needed to interpret customer clickstream data. They needed a product discovery partner that could take those millions of inputs, ingest them into a machine learning model, and use that model to show each individual customer the products most likely to appeal to them. 

For example, if a shopper browsing for dog food and dog toys then types “collar” into the search bar, they should see dog collars first.

With Constructor, this functionality is available right out of the box, along with the merchandising controls needed to finesse the experience. This was the final need Petco wanted Constructor to solve: gaining a clear view into how the AI works and why it ranks the way it does, and easy-to-use merchandising tools to overrule the AI where appropriate. Because Constructor only works with large retailers and brands like Petco, they found that Constructor’s product had truly been built for people like them and gave them the tools they needed to understand Constructor’s AI and merchandise on top of it when needed.

Armed with Constructor’s combination of advanced machine learning and total control over the searchandising experience, Petco was now able to intervene manually when needed — and otherwise let the algorithm work to drive conversion metrics.

The Results

+13%

in total conversions

+4%

in sitewide revenue

Driving cumulative lifts over time, Constructor helped Petco gain millions of dollars in additional revenue by improving the customer experience onsite.

“Our team has been extremely impressed with Constructor’s search and discovery solution,” says Tony Gabriele, VP of Merchandising at Petco.

“First and most importantly, the solution more than pays for itself, which Constructor was willing to prove via A/B tests. But on top of that, we’re able to searchandise much more effectively with the advanced merchandising controls now available to us, and we love the flexibility we have to partner with the AI and to boost or bury products on our own.”

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.