Seeing “out of stock” while shopping online has become a familiar experience over the past two months, as products disappeared from online shelves.
Online equine shop SmartPak wanted to make that unpleasant consumer experience better.
Though only 2% of products it sold were affected by coronavirus-related supply chain issues, SmartPak knew it was losing sales due to these out-of-stock products. While some of its loyal customers would wait for the product to return, others – especially people arriving via a Google search – might never check again. SmartPak turned off paid marketing for out-of-stock products, but customers were still finding those items organically.
In addition, SmartPak was seeing an influx of customers as brick-and-mortar competitors closed. It wanted to help them and provide a seamless ordering experience.
So the provider of horse supplies and personalized horse supplements turned to Dynamic Yield, the personalization platform it has used for the past two years, to come up with a solution.
That solution consisted of a recommendation carousel that appeared just below a product’s “out of stock” notice and hid the “buy” button. The technology took about a week to go live, and went up in early April.
By adding recommendations for products in stock, SmartPak saw a 9% lift in revenue and a 4% lift in purchases over the past few weeks.
Plus, the recommendation widget appears and disappears dynamically, so as products become orderable again, the SmartPak team doesn’t need to manually add or remove the widget.
“This is something that we have been wanting to do for awhile. It took a crisis for us to try it for the first time,” said Cathleen Voss, senior manager of ecommerce product management.
But now that SmartPak has done the technical heavy lifting to implement the new recommendation carousel, it’s brainstorming other ways it can use the feature post-COVID-19.
“Now that we know how to make the strategy work, we are thinking about using it for discontinued products or products with high bounce rates,” Voss said.
Dynamic Yield also enables different types of audience listening, so SmartPak can analyze the differences between new and repeat customers, customers that own horses vs. ride them, and how they behave on desktop vs. mobile.
So as consumer behavior shifts temporarily – or creates lasting change – due to the pandemic, SmartPak can more easily track what’s going on as people care for their horses during and beyond COVID-19.
