Page 18 - How Top Merchants Create the Best Customer Experience

18 ONLINE SHOPPERS WANT A FAST SITE AND THEIR INPUT TO COUNT

HOW TOP MERCHANTS CREATE THE BEST CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

will consider adding the product, says Vanessa Vumbaca, digital

content manager at CostumeBox.

The retailer takes into account if shoppers are continually

searching for a particular costume for a long period of time,
and not if there is a high volume of searches in a short period,
Vumbaca says. For example, CostumeBox added costumes related
to the movie The Matrix, the television series Squid Game and the
Lara Croft costume from “Tomb Raider” after shoppers continually

typed these searches into its search bar for months. In contrast,
if shoppers only searched for Squid Game for two weeks and
then those searchers dried up, it would not look to add that

costume, she says.

The search bar is responsible for 57% of CostumeBox’s sales, so it’s
key that it produces relevant results. Plus, a shopper who searches
for a product has 1.2-times higher average order value than a

shopper who makes a purchase without using the search bar, such
as arriving at the product detail page from search results or using
the homepage navigation features, Vumbaca says.

Because the search tool is so foundational to CostumeBox’s
customer experience, the retailer continually works to improve its
functionality. For example, each week CostumeBox pulls a report of
when a shopper types something in the search bar and the retailer

returns zero results. Often, shoppers are just misspelling an item.

“Character names can be tricky,” Vumbaca says. “You would be

surprised how many ways you can spell ‘Britney Spears.’”

So if CostumeBox sees a shopper typed “Brittany Spears,” it can
then put that in the backend as a synonym for “Britney Spears”
so costumes related to the pop singer will still show up even if

shoppers misspell her name.

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