The Works

• RETAIL SEGMENT: Arts and Crafts Discount Retailer
• PRODUCT: Personalized Search
• CHALLENGE: To improve the functionality and performance of the on-site search function
• RESULTS: 36% attribution for online sales

The Works is a retailer that serves over 22.5 million customers each year – stocking 40,000 different products including books, toys, gifts, stationery and arts & crafts at discount prices. Selling over 1 million products each week, The Works appeals to anyone looking for a wide variety of products at great value prices.

Lack of Functionality and Performance Data with Current Solution

The Works has been working with RichRelevance since 2013, employing product recommendations and content personalisation solutions across its website www.theworks.co.uk. As ecommerce sales have grown as a percentage of overall sales, The Works were looking to improve other areas of their website. In 2017 they started to look for a new onsite search solution, as their current solution lacked functionality as well as performance data on how it was working.

Alex Beard, Online Trading Manager at The Works takes up the story. “Previously, we’d employed an out of the box solution. It was restrictive in its functionality and performed very poorly at a subjective level. I say subjective, as we had no data to help us understand how it was performing at an objective level.”

Focus on Connecting Shoppers with Exactly what they Search for

The Works reviewed several onsite search solutions, including a thorough benchmarking analysis. In the end the decision was easy, and The Works chose the RichRelevance personalised on-site search solution, Find™, due to its ability to connect shoppers with exactly what they were looking for, as Alex explains:

“After meeting with RichRelevance, it was apparent that they’d created a solution that really focused on providing the most relevant results for the customer. We felt that RichRelevance had a better understanding of what we required from our site-search. We had no interest in all of the “fluffy” parts of search that others were pitching us (like SEO benefits) and only had an absolute interest in making sure customers found exactly what they were looking for when they came to our site. After a thorough competitor benchmarking project, we found that Find was the best solution to do this for The Works.”

Find performance is extremely positive

RichRelevance implemented Find™ on theworks.co.uk in just 12 weeks to ensure they were up and running in time for the 2017 Peak Trading Season. During the peak season, 36% of The Works online sales can be directly attributed to the implementation of Find™. Since peak trading, Find™ has continued to help The Works optimise searches for key terms over Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter. Their Findability score has remained strong, as has their conversion rates.

“We are delighted with the performance of Find. After a strong start over peak trading, it has helped us achieve great like for likes in January and February of this year, of 20% and 45% respectively.”

“We can see customers have been finding what they want, and quickly. The results being returned are more akin to customer expectations.”

The Works are continuing to optimise their implementation of Find™ and are also now looking at personalising their listing pages with the RichRelevance Discover™ solution.