Case Study: Netshoes Kicks Off World Cup 2010 Shopping Season With Personalized Online Customer Experience

Problem: Netshoes, a leading Brazilian retailer of sports shoes, apparel and accessories, wanted to visitors to its website to have a personalized shopping experience.

Solution: The company contracted with a software company which offers web search recommendation software as a service products.

Results: Netshoes’ conversion rate has increased 30 percent and its average order value is up 10 percent since it launched recommendation technology on its site.

Netshoes, a leading Brazilian sports retailer, has selected software company Baynote's recommendation technology to deliver customers a more adaptive online shopping experience. Within one month of deploying Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform, Netshoes’ conversion rate increased 30 percent and its average order value rose 10 percent.

"The results with Baynote were immediate and far-reaching," said Marcio Kumruian, CEO and founder of Netshoes in a company press release. “The increased conversion rate continues to contribute significantly to Netshoes’ bottom line, and we’re really well positioned to take advantage of the influx of Brazilian National team fans coming to our site this World Cup season."

Netshoes is Brazil’s largest online retailer of sports shoes, jerseys and accessories with over 300,000 unique daily visitors. The retailer’s manual merchandising of what it assumed to be natural complementary products required a great deal of effort with little return on investment. Netshoes turned to Baynote because it combined the power of crowd-driven recommendations with easy-to-use merchandising controls. During the lead up to the World Cup — where Netshoes is expecting a spike in traffic from Brazilian National team fans — visitors will benefit from a more personal shopping experience that adapts to their individual interests and intent in real time.

“We've really come to rely on how the Baynote system is able to anticipate trends and automatically display the most popular and soon-to-be-hit items,” said Pedro Reiss, e-commerce director for Netshoes’ partner agency, F.biz. “And during a heavy shopping season like World Cup, where we have specific search campaigns targeting Brazilian team fans, we also like the platform’s powerful expert-controlled merchandising capabilities.”

Netshoes implemented the recommendation technology before the World Cup to optimize the shopping experience for its customers. For example, Netshoes is able to “blacklist” certain soccer jerseys so they're not recommended as complementary products for products from rival teams. These recommendations would seem otherwise logical, were it not for the intense rivalry between supporters of different clubs.

During the World Cup, Netshoes has invested heavily in a large inventory of National team jerseys, as well as in search marketing. Because such a large number of patriotic, first-time visitors are expected, Netshoes will be “pinning” the Brazilian national team jersey to every product page hoping to turn these first time visitors into purchasers and eventually long-term customers.