Success Story: Shadestation & Sooqr

Shadestation is a UK-based designer sunglass, prescription optics and watches retailer. The company’s USP is that they have their own optical lab on-site, meaning they can glaze chosen frames in any prescription and have them with their customers the next day rather than having to wait the usual 5-7 days for online retailers. Shadestation has 3 brands (Shade Station, Glasses Station and Total Watches) each with websites in 37 countries. 

Sooqr is currently being used on www.shadestation.co.uk, au.shadestation.com and us.shadestation.com. Shade Station is the main brand and as such gets the highest traffic levels. Initially, they wanted to set up Sooqr within the UK site to test its effectiveness and have since rolled it out to the US and Australian sites too, as these also receive significant enough traffic to warrant the investment.

‘I work as a consultant for Shadestation and look after all their online systems (websites, warehousing, epos) – I built them originally back in 2005 and have been working on them for Shadestation since. I’m regularly over in the Netherlands for another business I own, so working with Sooqr – a Dutch company – on this was really easy. I was able to come into their office and speak to the team when we were initially considering what to do.’

‘The implementation was really simple. As with any new system, it took a bit of trial and error to get used to how to tag our data and set up our filters within the control panel, but now we’re used to it, it’s easy to use. I had a great experience with the Sooqr support team, as once I’d raised a ticket they acted directly so everything displayed exactly how we would want it to. The insights into our queries without results were surprising: a lot of people were misspelling our key brands – previously this would have brought up 0 results. With Sooqr however, the search realises what our customers are intending so we can show them our full collection and they actually find what they are looking for.’

‘In the first month after implementing Sooqr (compared to the same month in the previous year), we had a 33.53% increase in conversion rate from visitors that used site search. This led to a 48.26% increase in revenue from visitors using our search. Since that first month we’ve refined our Sooqr further by adding more filters, tags etc… and if I look at the period since we went live with the tool (compared to the previous year over the same period – September 1 2019 – March 10, 2020, versus September 1 2018 – March 10 2019) our conversion rate of visitors using site search is up 50.20% and revenue from those visitors is up 54.78%!

Before Sooqr we used our own search we built into the website – it couldn’t find close match products and was much, much slower than using Sooqr. Often results pages could take several moments to appear. Using Sooqr means our visitors get accurate results immediately and it’s showing in the massive increases we’ve had in conversion rates from those visitors.

The great thing about Sooqr is the ease of implementation. We received some great aftercare from the support team. They are very knowledgeable and quick to sort any issues out. Our search is now lightning fast and brings results that speak for themselves. I would highly recommend Sooqr to others – I’ve already recommended to several people I know who’ve been on the lookout for a better search experience on their site.’

Are you curious to see how powerful onsite search can boost your conversion and sales as well?

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