Decathlon Singapore: Driving 50% higher conversion rate with omnichannel, personalized search

The challenge

Delivering on a cutting-edge omnichannel experience

Since the start of building their ecommerce platform in 2018, Decathlon Singapore understood the value of great search for their customers. The main idea behind the experience they built was to put the product first. 

Richard Migette, E-commerce Project Leader at Decathlon Singapore, doubled down on making every product purchase 3 to 4 clicks from the homepage. This was even more important with 80% of their traffic coming from mobile, where shoppers’ attention span and screen real estate are even scarcer.

What makes Decathlon Singapore unique is their cutting-edge omnichannel strategy. Decathlon’s promise to their customers is to be able to collect any item in less than 2 hours in one of numerous click-and-collect stores in Singapore — whether they order it from their phone, laptop or the store itself. Furthermore, the store has to be fewer than 15 minutes from the customer’s location. 

The challenge? All stores won’t carry the entire catalog in store at any given moment. Decathlon offers in-store computers to shoppers, so they can navigate the entire catalog while benefiting from Decathlon’s teammate’s expertise. It was critical for Richard to leverage the teammate’s expertise on Decathlon’s catalog, and their direct contact with customers.

The solution

The right tool to execute on Decathlon Singapore’s strong vision

In addition to solving their advanced omnichannel strategy and requirements, Decathlon Singapore wanted to provide an experience tailored to their audience, their catalog and their business goals. Control and visibility over the experience were key. To combine all those requirements, Richard chose Algolia. 

“What first impressed us was Algolia’s performance and reliability. Thanks to their distributed infrastructure, the search experience is always working, and always fast. This allows us to focus on shaping the solution to our needs instead of maintaining it” Richard Migette, E-commerce Project Leader at Decathlon Singapore 

While deploying the new experience on web, mobile and in stores, Richard started shaping the search to Decathlon’s unique needs. 

He configured the ranking logic via Algolia’s dashboard, using business criteria such as number of purchases and attributes specific to Decathlon such as the sport discipline.

Bringing valuable, business-friendly features to play

Different Decathlon’s Singapore teams are using Algolia’s Visual Editor to merchandise and optimize the search experience, as well as incorporate direct feedback from in-store teammates. While the e-commerce team can execute campaigns at a country level by promoting specific items or categories for a given time, in-store teammates fine tune the experience based on their exchanges with shoppers, and what they’ve seen from shoppers exploring the catalog on in-store computers. 

The latest innovation Decathlon Singapore brought to their experience is search personalization. Using Algolia’s built-in tool and its configuration dashboard and simulator, Richard shaped their personalization strategy to their needs, by personalizing across attributes that are relevant for Decathlon, such as sport practice or nature of the product, as well as weighting how different events, from product pages views to purchases, should impact the personalized experience — while having a constant visibility of the impact and performance of personalization on the experience.

“For a retailer like us with more than 25,000 products in our catalog, a solution that improves each of our users’ experiences along their search journey adds tremendous value. Combined with a total control of the personalization algorithm, and total transparency on its impact via a real-time simulator and search A/B testing, Algolia’s built-in personalization represents a real step forward in the digital era for Decathlon Singapore”

The result

Delivering results, while already looking at the next breakthrough 

Continuously iterating on the experience, Richard has been able to measure performance improvement of Decathlon Singapore’s online store at each step. 

After identifying that a lot of shoppers bounced when they saw products out of stock, Decathlon used Algolia’s custom ranking to stop displaying those products. This increased their conversion rate by 0.6 points. 

After using Algolia’s Visual Editor to optimally merchandise search results, Decathlon’s teams saw a drop of “no result rate” from 5% to 1.8%. This made each shopper interaction with the platform more likely to result in a purchase. 

Then, after implementing search personalization, Decathlon’s team saw a 36% increase in click-through rate and 50% increase in conversion rate. 

• No result rate: from 5% to 1.8% 
• Click-through rate increase: 36%
• Conversion rate: 50%

Richard and his team do not plan to stop their efforts here. First, they plan to hire a Conversion Rate Optimization Manager to make the most out of their e-commerce stack. 

And with an always growing ambition to leverage the most efficient tools and build the most innovative shopping experience, Decathlon Singapore’s next step is to build Voice Search into their platform to enable their customers to find products in stores and online while they are on the go.

“Algolia represents a real step forward in the digital era for Decathlon Singapore” Richard Migette, E-commerce Project Leader at Decathlon Singapore