DEMANDWARE CASE STUDY Lifetime Brands Optimizes Product Placement, Active Merchandising and Site Search to Increase Conversion, Order Size, and Revenue Lifetime Brands is North America’s leading provider of nationally branded kitchenware, tabletop, and home décor products that make it easier for consumers to prepare food, serve meals, entertain guests, and decorate their homes with style. Consumers rely on the company’s acclaimed e-commerce sites to directly and efficiently purchase a broad range of products from some the industry’s best-known brands, including Farberware, KitchenAid, Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff, Cuisinart, Calvin Klein®, and many others. Its many product offerings include kitchenware, cutlery and cutting boards, bakeware and cookware, pantryware and spices, flatware, dinnerware, tabletop accessories, crystal stemware, giftware and barware. SEEKING A STANDARD, OPTIMIZED MERCHANDISE PRESENTATION Unfortunately, with so many collections, patterns, and SKUs, it was initially a challenge to deliver a consistent search and navigation experience for site visitors. According to Laura Siegel, VP of Housewares Brands, the merchandising of various brands and patterns has an important impact on the company’s e-commerce results. “Our buyers often know precisely what pattern they want when they come to one of our brand sites,” she said. “On Pfaltzgraff.com, a visitor might want something from the Winterberry pattern. When that happens, we want to first present what we call ‘Essential Items’ – our top-selling SKUs based on recent sales – and then present our line in a specific order. For instance, our complete 32-piece sets are a point of emphasis so we want to see those appear first, followed by our 16-piece, 48-piece, and 64-piece sets and then dinner plates and salad plates. And we want that to be consistent from pattern to pattern. That’s not just consistency for its own sake – we knew that this would optimize our sales, too.” At first, Lifetime Brands struggled for that uniform presentation. Layouts could vary significantly and merchandising personnel had to manually position each individual item in a collection to achieve a structured layout on-screen. When a new product was added, all of the product placements had to be manually shifted. Unfortunately, with 200-300 products changing each month among its various sites, the manual shifting of layouts was an extremely labor intensive process. “Working with Demandware’s Retail Practice Group we were able to improve our overall site navigation and improve our ability to merchandise our product line.” - Laura Siegel, Vice President, Housewares Brands Lifetime Brands, Inc. Siegel and her colleagues consulted with the experts from Demandware’s Retail Practice Group to find a better way. The result: customized “search placement codes” for all dinnerware subcategories leaving some blank numbers in between to allow for the addition of new product subcategories as seen in Figure 1 below: Search Placement Code Dinnerware Subcategory 400 32 Piece Set 395 16 Piece Set 390 48 Piece Set 385 64 Piece Set 380 Dinner Plate 375 Salad Plate ... ... Figure 1: List of Search Placement Codes assigned to order product subcategories. Because search placement codes are placed at the category or subcategory level, when a new dinner plate is added to the pattern, it automatically gets the appropriate search placement code. These dinnerware products are then used to populate the Patterns and Collections pages. Since the sorting rule for these pages is to present items according to search placement codes, all Patterns and Collections pages have exactly the same product layout – without any manual work. This consistent user experience can be seen in Figure 2 showing two popular Pfaltzgraff patterns – Winterberry and Evening Sun. DYNAMIC SORTING RULE PROMOTES BEST SELLERS In many cases customers are looking for replacement or add-on pieces like additional salad plates or dinner plates. To best merchandise these Dinnerware subcategories like Salad Plates or Cereal Bowls, an active merchandising sorting rule was added. The active merchandising sorting rule sequences the products in each category by best-sellers – using a mixture of the revenue and orders metrics. This has allowed the merchants to “set it and forget it.” They no longer have to manually position products for the Dinnerware subcategories. They also have the ability to feature certain products by using the Category Position feature. This allows merchandisers to pick their favorites to be at the top of a Dinnerware category and then let metrics take over and sort the rest by best sellers. IMMEDIATELY POSITIVE RESULTS According to Siegel, it was a relief to eliminate the countless hours that Lifetime spent manually reconfiguring the presentation on its various product pages. “We’re not wasting that time anymore,” she said. “That’s a huge advantage. But more importantly, we’re seeing amazing successes from a financial point of view. We analyzed the performance metrics for the three weeks before and compared it to the three weeks after we implemented the search placement codes. We saw that the order conversion increased 0.7 percentage points and the number of orders jumped 26%. These changes along with a Memorial Day promotion also contributed to an average weekly revenue lift of over $50,000 per week.” SIMPLIFYING SITE SEARCH – IN JUST MINUTES Lifetime Brands also wanted to find ways to refine and improve its site-search functionality. An amazing 20% of site visitors use the site search box to locate specific items – far higher than the average 8% usage that most Demandware sites experience. Again, this is because the Pfaltzgraff shopper is typically searching for specific patterns or for specific product types like coffee mugs or cereal bowls. However, the results were not targeted enough to meet their needs. Figure 2: Pfaltzgraff Pattern pages provide the same consistent product layout. Figure 3: Incorrect search results on page 1 due to a match in the long description. “The problem was that when the user entered a search term, a lot of false hits and inappropriate results were returned due to the fact that the product long descriptions were being searched,” said Siegel. “If someone searched for ‘salad plates,’ the first page might be full of complete dinnerware sets that include salad plates – simply because ‘salad plate’ was contained in the long description.” The results of this can be seen in Figure 3. “Working with Demandware’s Retail Practice Group we were able to improve our overall site navigation and improve our ability to merchandise our product line. Since these changes were so successful on the Pfaltzgraff site, we then rolled them to our Mikasa site and plan to implement them on our other sites. We can now deliver the right assortments to the right people at the right time – and that’s directly translating into greater revenue.” The solution was straightforward, simple, and fast. The team simply removed the search option from the long description. Then, search indexes were reindexed. In only a few minutes, the problem was fixed and search results were precise and targeted – exactly what shoppers were looking for. Overall, order conversion for the entire Pfaltzgraff site increased by 0.5 percentage points. More importantly, for searches directly for product types like ‘salad plates’ or ‘cereal bowls’ the number of orders and the items per order doubled and order conversion increased from 7.9 percent to 10.5 percent. “It’s pretty simple: if you don’t take people where they want to be – forget it,” Siegel said. “If your site visitors are searching specifically for coffee mugs and you show them dinnerware sets, they may leave – and they may not come back.” ABOUT DEMANDWARE, INC. The trusted, global leader in on-demand ecommerce, Demandware revolutionizes how businesses deliver customized shopping experiences to consumers in the digital world. Only Demandware combines the on-demand ecommerce platform rated #1 by industry analysts, an open ecosystem of partners that extend the value of the platform, and measurable commitment by its employees to enabling client revenue growth. Demandware continually sets industry standards for market innovation and client satisfaction. Demandware clients include industry leaders such as Bare Escentuals, Barneys New York, Columbia Sportswear, Crocs, Frederick’s of Hollywood, Hanover Direct, Jones Apparel Group, Lifetime Brands, Michaels Stores, Panasonic, Playmobil and Reitmans. Demandware Inc. 10 Presidential Way Woburn, MA 01801 888.553.9216 [email protected] www.demandware.com
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