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Wolseley Elevates B2B Product Search With Bloomreach Discovery

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Story Behind the Brand

With 550+ branches across the United Kingdom, Wolseley is a leading merchant in plumbing, heating, cooling, and infrastructure, striving to be the first choice for trade customers nationwide. Wolseley has seen great success through its strong customer service and supplier relationships, as well as specialist knowledge, ease of business, and competitive pricing. 

As Wolseley continued its digital transformation journey, the company wanted to revamp its search solution and find a scalable way to understand its customers’ needs across segments without adding more manual tasks to its small merchandising team’s ever-expanding to-do list. To refine its search and merchandising practices and cater to its many varying customer segments, Wolesley chose Bloomreach Discovery to continue to future-proof its processes.

25
%
increase in average order value (AOV) among segmented customers
24.17
£
average increase in revenue per visitor (RPV) among segmented customers
9.6
%
percentage point increase in conversion rate among segmented customers

Challenge

Despite its years of success offline, Wolseley confronted substantial challenges in its digital transformation journey, particularly in the realm of product discovery. Operating across diverse markets such as the UK and Ireland, the company’s vast array of 500,000 products — with 300,000 of them available digitally — presented a complex task in effectively targeting and serving its varied customer base. This complexity was further amplified by the need to cater to specific industry requirements for products within the plumbing, heating/cooling, building services, and pipe-fitting sectors. 

The main factor that was hindering Wolseley in its digital transformation was its reliance on build-it-yourself search technology platforms like Solr, which made it harder to construct a perceptive search engine that understood the nuances of each industry. This limitation affected the precision of search results and also impeded the company’s ability to properly segment its customer base. The segmentation issue was not merely a technical problem but also a strategic one, significantly impacting how Wolseley engaged with and fulfilled the needs of its diverse customer base across different markets.

Additionally, Wolseley’s internal processes were heavily manual, with its small team of merchandisers bearing the brunt of the workload. As a result, the team couldn’t focus its energy on things like expanding the product catalog, increasing the online customer base, and meeting the growing demand for more personalized shopping experiences. Wolseley knew it needed to stop building its own search engine and transition to a sophisticated, AI-powered product discovery platform. This initiative became imperative to meet Wolseley’s biggest e-commerce challenges head-on and aimed to further transform its online shopping experience into one that was seamless, efficient, and deeply aligned with customer needs and preferences across segments.

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Solution

To address the challenges Wolseley faced, the company turned to Bloomreach Discovery’s search and merchandising solutions (with a special focus on search personalization). By using Bloomreach’s relevance by segment feature, Wolseley can now serve tailored experiences to its diverse customer base by retrieving and ranking products based on specific segment data, such as the customer’s industry or the product’s application. For example, a plumber or an HVAC professional searching for “pumps” would receive customized search results relevant to their respective industries, leading to higher engagement, faster conversions, and increased AOV.

Aside from leveraging relevance by segment, Wolseley also took advantage of an extensive algorithm library powered by Loomi — Bloomreach’s e-commerce AI — to address its most pressing issues with search. More specifically, Wolseley’s search bar utilizes Loomi’s relevance score algorithm to ensure that queries are met with the most accurate product matches based on the keywords used for specific searches, such as “shower tray” or “worcester 4000” without creating a ton of rules that contradict one another. With the ability to separate products from their attributes, Loomi can assign product types with relevance scores that will rank them accordingly based on the search query. 

What’s more, Loomi helps Wolseley avoid a common pitfall in B2B e-commerce experiences, where misspellings or overly specific search terms can lead to limited or null results. By knowing when to relax a search query’s parameters, Loomi creates a better online experience that leads to fewer search exits. 

With Solr, you’re building a lot of rules, and once you get past 500 rules, it’s difficult to manage and maintain them because there are a lot of manual fixes. We also couldn’t figure out why people were getting certain results. Now, we look to Bloomreach to help us, and in doing so, we hold ourselves to the highest standards of product discovery.

Mark Parrish, Ecommerce Manager at Wolseley

Mark Parrish

Ecommerce Trading Manager at Wolseley

Results

One look at the key performance metrics and it’s clear that Wolseley’s strategic implementation of Bloomreach has driven a noticeable impact. After using relevance by segment, 20% of site search visits fell into a mere five segments that Wolseley created with the Bloomreach team. These five segments drove 53% of overall search orders, indicating an easier path to purchase.

Looking more granularly, Wolseley was able to improve all of its most important metrics. Conversion rates from search increased 9.6 percentage points for segmented customers! Additionally, AOV increased by 25%, with customers spending an average of £24.17 more per order. This could be attributed to the fact that customers viewed 14% more products and made 11% more searches. Moreover, the number of customers who added more to their carts increased by an impressive 18 percentage points. These numbers indicate a more intuitive path to purchase and also showcase the effectiveness of Bloomreach’s personalization and search optimization tools. They also clearly demonstrate that the segmented groups not only spent more time on the website but also spent more money, converting visits into purchases much more effectively than the control group. 

Overall, Wolseley’s gains show Bloomreach Discovery’s ability to deliver a tailored, relevant experience to shoppers within different segments. With its clear success in e-commerce search, especially in the realm of search personalization, Wolseley is now looking into other ways to create successful customer journeys by leveraging Loomi (including recently going live with Bloomreach’s recommendations) as they continue to blaze the trail in B2B digital transformation.

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