Wickes Continues To Build On Its Search Foundation With Bloomreach

Wickes is a digitally led, service-enabled home improvement retailer. With an extensive range of products and DIY brands, a kitchen and bathroom design and installation service, solar panel offerings, and a loyalty scheme for local trade, Wickes is the perfect partner for small and large-scale projects. With 230 stores across the UK, it has everything customers need, whether an amateur DIYer or trade professional. Alongside its strong in-store presence, Wickes continues to invest in its ecommerce experience to better support customers researching, planning, and purchasing online.

Challenge

As search became an increasingly important entry point for Wickes’ customers, expectations around relevance and speed continued to grow, particularly for high-intent users searching with specific product requirements.

While Wickes already had a strong search foundation in place, evolving customer behavior introduced new complexity. Customers were increasingly using more detailed, technical, and long-tail queries. Often, this search behavior was part of planning larger purchases or full-scale projects, which only raised the bar for how precisely search needed to interpret intent and return accurate results.

Overall, the team faced several challenges in maintaining and scaling search performance:

More complex and specific search queries. Home improvement retail shoppers have long relied on specification-driven searches, including dimensions, materials, and product types. However, as search behavior continued to evolve, queries became longer and more conversational, requiring search to move beyond exact keyword matching and interpret intent like a human would.
Opportunity to better capture high-intent demand. Search users consistently showed higher intent than other visitors, making it critical to return the right results on the first attempt to avoid losing conversion opportunities to competitors.
Manual optimization limited scalability. While the team had strong product discovery workflows in place, maintaining performance now required manually identifying and refining underperforming long-tail queries. Building on their existing search foundation, the Wickes ecommerce team aimed to evolve search to drive even more significant performance.

Solution

To take its search capabilities further, Wickes launched a proof of concept (POC) to test Loomi’s autonomous search functionality through search+.

Working closely with the Bloomreach team, Wickes introduced search+ within a controlled test environment and benchmarked the performance against its existing search experience.

By expanding upon its groundwork for product search, Wickes validated the impact of AI-driven query understanding and automated optimization. Powered by Loomi, the platform continuously learns from customer behavior, using real-time signals to refine relevance based on how they interact with products.

Here’s how Bloomreach supported Wickes:

- AI-driven understanding of complex and technical queries. Using AI to interpret intent by combining query context, product attributes, and behavioral signals, search+ made it easier to return the exact products customers were searching for, even when queries included detailed specifications like timber dimensions or screw lengths.
- More consistent, relevance-driven results. With a firmer understanding of customer intent, search+ improved the accuracy and consistency of search result sets, especially for shoppers who arrived with a clear idea of what they needed. This approach helped reduce the need for repeated searches or navigation through broader categories to find the product.
- Reduced reliance on manual optimization. While the Wickes team had strong processes in place to manage search performance, search+ introduced more automated improvements to relevance. With less time spent managing long-tail queries, the team can now focus on refining merchandising strategies, optimizing product discovery flows, and improving how products are surfaced across the site.
- Enabling more dynamic, behavior-driven experiences. With the introduction of real-time segmentation, Wickes plans to build upon its search performance. By responding to customer behavior in the moment, the team can adapt customer experiences in real time based on signals like specific search queries, PLP interactions, and add-to-cart activity, opening the door to more context-aware journeys across the site.

How It Worked

Controlled POC environment and performance benchmarking. Wickes introduced search+ within a controlled testing environment, allowing the team to directly compare performance against its existing search experience. The setup made it possible to isolate the impact of more advanced query handling and automated ranking in real-world scenarios.
Real-time query processing without manual rules. Search+ processed incoming queries dynamically and removed the need to set any supplementary predefined rules or manual adjustments. With this shift in approach, the system easily handled variations in phrasing, formatting, and terminology, without the need for additional configuration from the team.
Integration with the existing product catalog and attributes. Search+ leveraged Wickes’ existing product data, including attributes like size, material, and product type. This way, the results reflected the structure and specificity of its catalog without requiring the move of or changes to underlying data.
Continuous feedback loop from on-site behavior. Loomi ingested live behavioral signals to continuously refine how results were ranked. These signals helped the autonomous search system adjust in real time based on how customers interacted with particular sets of search results.
Seamless transition from POC to full deployment. After validating performance during the testing phase, Wickes expanded search+ to all site traffic without disrupting the existing experience. The team is currently expanding its search foundation by scaling its use of Loomi and investing in product recommendations and real-time segmentation. To better support project-based purchasing, Wickes aims to help customers move seamlessly from finding individual products to building complete carts more efficiently.

“Loomi search+ has built on our approach to product discovery and made it even more effective. Customers can find exactly what they need faster, and it’s helped us drive stronger conversion and RPV while giving the team more time to focus on bigger-picture improvements.”

Holly Walsh

E-Commerce Trading Manager

Results

Following the rollout of search+, Wickes improved how customers move from searching for individual items to completing larger purchases. By making it easier to identify and combine the right products, site search now supports more efficient buying journeys, encouraging customers to progress more quickly toward checkout.

Key results include:

76% reduction in failed searches, significantly improving the search experience
3% uplift in conversion rate (vs. control), driven by more relevant results
4% increase in revenue per visit (RPV), reflecting stronger monetization of site traffic

Aside from performance metrics, the impact of the Loomi platform extended to how the team operates. With less time spent managing queries, the Wickes ecommerce team can now focus on higher-value initiatives like driving ongoing improvements across the site search experience.

Request Demo

By continuously learning from on-site behavior, such as search queries, product clicks, and add-to-cart activity, search+ dynamically adjusts for ranking and relevance. See how smart search drives actual results. Take Bloomreach’s interactive tour!

Wickes Continues To Build On Its Search Foundation With Bloomreach

Challenge