CASE STUDY

“We can reliably predict the outcome of every change we make with SLI. That is a huge time savings and benefit to our day-to-day management of the site.”

Nick Ashton

Manager, Site Experience, Pet360.com

Solution

Results

Challenge

Company

Pet360.com

Industry

Pet Supplies

With 6,000-7,000 products, Pet360.com needed a more reliable, simple and cohesive way to manage site search and address merchandising team requests.

Using a suite of SLI Systems solutions integrated with Magento, Pet360.com has significantly increased conversions, cut administration time and provided customers with a site experience that stands out in a competitive market.

20 %increase in revenue from search with SLI

83%of SLI Site Champion visitors are first-time visitors

SLI Products in Action

Pet360.com, the number-one resource for pet parents, is dedicated to helping people across the United States find what they need for their pets quickly and affordably. Pet360.com launched in 2012 as a personalized content site, then in 2013 evolved into an e-commerce site focused on the health and wellness of pets. Today, the e-commerce site has 6,000-7,000 products available to purchase at any given time.

In 2015, the Pet360.com site experience team was bogged down working in multiple interfaces to manage thousands of products. Their previous search solution’s content management system wasn’t fully integrated so the team could not rely on changes made in its Magento platform to be reflected accurately on the site. Category and landing pages filtered through the search provider with unreliable outcomes so the team was spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting issues across systems. Pet360.com also needed a solution that would allow for quick price adjustments and merchandising since pricing is an area of fierce competition in the pet supply market.

After reviewing several alternative solutions, Pet360.com decided to use a suite of SLI solutions to ease site management, drive high-quality organic search traffic to the site, and connect shoppers with the products they are most likely to buy. “What separated SLI from other search solutions was the machine learning, for sure,” said Nick Ashton, Pet360.com’s Manager, Site Experience.

Adopting Best-of-Breed Search and Navigation

In December 2015, the team rolled out SLI Learning Search®, SLI Rich Auto Complete™, SLI Landing Page Creator™ and SLI Site Champion® to Pet360.com and PetFoodDirect.com.

“We could set up SLI any way we wanted and then easily accommodate requests from our merchandising team versus being at the mercy of how our previous ‘conceptual search’ system was organized,” Nick said. “It was refreshing to eliminate the guesswork, do anything with our catalog and have it pulled into SLI. Our customer success manager was awesome at guiding us through every step, giving feedback and working toward the end goal.”

To ensure a consistent experience across both navigation and search experiences, the team transitioned in the spring from a product catalog tree in Magento to SLI Learning Navigation®. The solution dynamically builds site navigation pages and continually re-ranks products based on user behavior, showing the most relevant products higher on the page.

“Once we were able to plug in SLI Learning Navigation links site-wide and make the switch to where any page you land on in results was SLI, we really saw a huge pop in performance,” Nick explained.

Win-Win for Pet Parents and Site Experience Team

With SLI, Pet360.com has made site management easier and provided users with accurate search results and an efficient path to purchase – catering to their most valuable shoppers. Pet360.com customers who use site search convert at a much higher rate than non-search users. During the first five months of having SLI in place, Pet360.com saw a 20% increase in revenue from search.

Administration processes have also improved. “The impact of SLI Rich Auto Complete and search optimization have been great! Rankings for the top-searched or top-purchased products rise to the top of results, and it is easy to spot any unusually high results. With Landing Page Creator™, we can easily create campaigns and pages that target specific customers with specific deals. For instance, creating a BOGO Bonanza email campaign or a one-off NFL or Halloween shop is really easy and doesn’t bog down Magento,” explained site experience manager Jennie Gaughen.

“Our SLI customer success team is really an asset. They are uniquely strategic and helpful in refining our reporting and optimizing search. They have a complete grasp of the functionality so we can instead collaborate to focus on the end result,” added Nick.

Given the performance and overall success with SLI, the site experience team plans to also use SLI solutions on its PetMD.com brand, the largest online library of pet health information.

CASE STUDY

About SLI Systems

SLI Systems enables the world’s leading e-commerce retailers to increase sales by connecting shoppers with the products they’re most likely to buy. With proven search technology that learns from the activity of real site visitors, SLI delivers SaaS-based site search, navigation, merchandising, mobile, recommendations and SEO solutions that arm retailers with the tools they need for rapid growth. To learn more visit sli-systems.com, sli-systems.com.au or sli-systems.co.uk. © 2017 SLI SYSTEMS