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Level Nine Sports Increases Conversion Rate by 23% With Bloomreach Discovery and BigCommerce
Level Nine Sports is a top retailer of skiing, snowboarding, biking, and other outdoor products in the western United States. It is committed to providing the highest-quality products paired with elite customer service at the lowest prices possible. Level Nine Sports desires to get new people involved in outdoor sports and operates four brick-and-mortar stores in Utah along with its ecommerce business.
The Challenge
Level Nine Sports began as an ecommerce company first before opening its brick-and-mortar stores in Utah. With its in-person shoppers, it could easily direct them to the products they wanted or needed and showcase top sellers, new products, or sale items.
But how could it do that effectively online? Level Nine Sports’ challenge became offering an equally great customer experience online as it could to shoppers who were walking into a physical store. This included connecting shoppers with products they desired and with inventory that the company wanted to move.
Being able to get our foot in the door and getting on the path to being headless is probably what we’re most proud of. We’re happy right now because we feel like we’ve truly had a win [with Bloomreach Discovery]. That definitely is not always the case when getting into a large technical project with another company. This has been a true success.
Nick Murdock
The Solution
The partnership between Bloomreach and BigCommerce has helped Level Nine Sports address its challenges and record impressive uplift with key metrics.
Using Bloomreach Discovery as its product discovery engine and BigCommerce as the ecommerce platform, Level Nine Sports reinvented how customers find the products they seek. By using AI to optimize the majority of search discoverability challenges, the team no longer needs to worry about whether results will come back for very specific product searches like “backcountry avalanche transceiver” or if there is a synonym created for interchangeable terms like “coat” and “jacket.”
This freedom has allowed Level Nine Sports to focus on building new, innovative experiences like better ways to bundle multiple products together (e.g., skis + bindings + poles) or to share content related to a purchase decision (e.g., “How to Set Your Ski Bindings”).
The implementation took just one month from beginning to end, with the Bloomreach Discovery BigCommerce app powering the core search and category experience, and some custom front-end development when adding recommendations and content search.
After implementing, Level Nine Sports saw qualitative improvements to its search experience and quantitative improvements to its conversion rate. Bloomreach also helped solve a growing business issue with inventory utilization of niche items that were staying in the warehouse for too long. Discovery’s Semantic Search helped these items automatically rise up in common search requests, and the site merchandising tools helped Level Nine Sports boost these items in specific category pages and search terms.
As a result, the company could clear out old inventory faster, thus putting working capital back in the business and allowing for better inventory utilization.
Level Nine Sports has enhanced the digital journey for its customers with a significantly revamped product discovery experience. The next stage of the journey now awaits, focused on significantly improving the front-end experience, site speed, and personalization.
The Results
Level Nine Sports has seen incredible uplift since implementing Bloomreach Discovery. In comparing numbers from Q4 2020 to Q4 2021, Level Nine Sports has seen a 23.4% increase in conversion rate, a 42% increase in time spent on its website after search, and a 29.7% decrease in search exits.
Outside of the incredible metrics, Level Nine Sports has also begun its journey to becoming completely headless on top of BigCommerce. This is key because it will give Level Nine Sports greater creative flexibility and optimization capability as they build an engaging, differentiated online customer experience that ties in seamlessly with its brick-and-mortar stores.
Bloomreach and BigCommerce can also help your business achieve its goals. Learn more here.
