SikSilk teams with Nosto and reports 25% boost in e-commerce purchases from on-site search

Urban streetwear brand, SikSilk, says that it has seen a 25% increase in e-commerce purchases from on-site search and a 36% fall in site exits from its search pages since implementing new AI technology from Nosto.

It is now able to merchandise the products that appear in search results in line with inventory levels, while also increasing relevancy and preventing ‘dead end’ searches (in which no products or an incomplete list of products are shown).

SikSilk is a British born brand with stores across the UK, US, Australia and Spain and was previously relying on the native on-site search functionality of its e-commerce platform. It turned to Nosto to bring more sophistication to the search experience and solve various pain-points.

Its native search technology didn’t provide the capability to sort products listed in search results based on availability, meaning products were being pushed that might only have had one available size in stock, for example.

With Nosto’s Search, however, it has been able to create a global merchandising rule to ensure that all search results boost products with greater inventory and more SKU availability across size, colour and style.

“Being able to adjust our search results in relation to these ranking rules on a global level was key for us in optimising our search,” says Chris Longshaw, E-commerce Manager at SikSilk.

Another issue that had been impacting on-site search performance was the fact that certain search queries weren’t retrieving all relevant products, restricting the choice of items shown to shoppers and impacting possible conversions. 

“Queries containing words such as colours, for example, were particularly problematic,” says Longshaw. 

As Nosto’s search technology uses self-learning algorithms that learn from shopper behaviour, those queries that were returning incomplete results (such as around colour), were quickly solved without needing manual effort from SikSilk.

Some search queries had previously been leading to no results pages, either because shoppers were using a synonym for a product that the previous search technology couldn’t detect, or because SikSilk didn’t stock the exact type of product being queried, and didn’t have alternative suggestions in place to show.

It was able to use Nosto to tackle this issue by configuring appropriate synonyms for the terms shoppers enter in search queries.

For instance, it grouped ‘Jackets’ along with ‘Coats’, knowing that shoppers used these terms interchangeably. And because Nosto’s technology identified that queries for ‘boots’ were returning no results, it set up synonyms so that products from ‘footwear’, ‘trainers’ and ‘shoes’ categories would be listed for these searches.

In general, the predictive algorithms within Nosto’s Search can automatically identify and recommend relevant synonyms using behaviorial data, eliminating guesswork and manual effort.

The system also allows retailers to specify alternative or related products if a specific product is not available to encourage shoppers to continue browsing rather than exit the site.

SikSilk says that it has noticed improvements around zero results pages since implementing Nosto.

Longshaw comments: “With Nosto, everything we expect to appear for given queries, appears. There are definitely positives there.”

“Additionally, Nosto’s analytics give some good insights around no results queries that we didn’t have access to before. It’s helpful to see what queries are being regularly made that retrieve no results, not just for us to consider how synonyms can mitigate these, but also to highlight opportunities for the likes of our buying teams.”