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• RETAIL SEGMENT: Fashion & Apparel
• PRODUCT: Experience Personalization Suite
• CHALLENGE: For the launch of its first-ever eCommerce offering, the largest Brazilian fast-fashion retailer, Riachuelo, wanted to deliver a cutting-edge personalized search experience that would dynamically prioritize shoppers’ individual preferences, at scale.
• RESULTS:15% the total visitors use On-site search and it drives conversion at a 3x higher rate than the site overall

Riachuelo is the largest fashion company in Brazil, with more than 300 stores and 40.000 employees, a sophisticated supply chain that supports manufacturing 90% of the apparel it sells. In the past decade, the 70-year-old company has remade itself in the image of Zara and H&M, bringing “fast fashion” to Brazil’s growing upwardly-mobile population. The company prides itself on delivering 200 new styles daily to even its most far-fung locations.

In addition to a line of everyday basics and fast-fashion pieces that anticipate momentary trends, Riachuelo also ofers higher-end collections that periodically feature collaborations with top-name designers such as Donatella Versace. The model has been so successful that Riachuelo sustained solid year-over-year sales growth even through the country’s recent economic turbulence.

Challenge

Riachuelo has long offered rich web content and active social media communities, and decided to add an eCommerce presence in 2016. Riachuelo’s stores are tailored to local markets, with different footprints and assortments as well as personalized services for in-store shoppers. As the company ramped up to support online selling, it needed to replicate that one-to-one experience in tandem with its up-to-the-minute style.

Riachuelo’s fast-changing product lineup presented a further challenge. With 48,000 items produced, distributed and sold annually, the company needed to find tools to connect shoppers efficiently with the latest products matching their needs in the moment.

Solution

With personalization as a top priority, Riachuelo opted to integrate the entire suite of RichRelevance products into its first eCommerce offering. The implementation included Riachuelo pioneering the latest RichRelevance solution, Find, which optimizes the on-site search experience to present individualized results sets.

How it Works

When designing its on-site eCommerce search experience, Riachuelo wanted a flexible solution that would dynamically combine internal logic, shoppers’ input, and implicit context signals to return the most relevant set of results possible for each individual shopper.

Find’s three-tier personalization stack enables Riachuelo to set multiple search parameters and combine those criteria with input from shoppers to create highly personalized product assortments. First, The Riachuelo team can incorporate segments from its their CRM system for association with products and categories. Dynamic segmentation within the Find tool also allows for enables creation of further business rules on the fly based on such criteria like as inventory availability, geographic location, referrer, and product category

Furthermore, Find gives Riachuelo’s team full control over the set of searchable attributes associated with each product. Riachuelo can define and weight the attributes so that each is accorded the right importance and the algorithm applies the right degree of personalization. This fine-tuning capability essentially controls when and where personalization occurs within searches, focusing the power of the Find engine on the attributes most important to shoppers.

Find also provides Riachuelo with the control to combine key business parameters (such as inventory levels) with shoppers’ keyword search term, as well as any previously-supplied profile data, such as size and color preferences. The search tool accounts for misspellings, plurals, synonyms, and the like, not only for the results set, but for type-ahead search box suggestions that guide shoppers to relevant categories, individual products, and value-added content. The product images that accompany the search results are tailored on the fly to match desired colors; for example, a search for “pink shirts” returns product images displaying pink color options.

Shoppers’ on-site behavior is also factored into Find, with viewed products and categories influencing the search results in real time. Find also draws on the “wisdom of crowds,” analyzing what the community of site shoppers typically does after searching for certain words and using this data to prioritize results.

Finally, Find factors in individual context cues to help Riachuelo deliver optimal results. Location, seasonality, time of day, and proximity to local outlets can all influence the results set to deliver a truly individualized search experience (including both which products are surfaced and the order they’re displayed) for every shopper.

Results

Since launching the eCommerce site in 2017 with full-featured personalization, Riachuelo has earned high engagement and established a solid track record of online sales.

Find has proved an efective engine for sales. The 15% of site shoppers using the on-site search tool are 3 times more likely to convert than the overall average. Furthermore, zero-results searches represent just 0.16% of all queries, reducing the bounce rate following search — suggesting that shoppers are connecting with relevant products and content worthy of further engagement. Riachuelo’s overall fndability score – a calculation that captures whether sites deliver the right results eficiently, with a minimum of manual sort-and-flter steps – is 7.3%.

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