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A poor site search experience made it difficult for customers to find products in Noble Knight's 100,000-item catalog. Too many searches ended in zero results, costing thousands of sales.
Noble Knight chose Zoovu over three other search vendors for its features, Data Platform, insights, and white-glove implementation support — and went live in just six weeks.
Conversion increased 30% immediately after launch. The team also boosted efficiency and made more informed purchasing decisions with Zoovu insights.
Noble Knight Games' biggest advantage — its massive product catalog — was also its biggest weakness. Its claim to fame is offering the world's largest selection of games, over 100,000 in total, helping the brand build a huge community of loyal customers.
But these same gaming enthusiasts were having difficulty finding the exact items they were looking for. The issue was made worse by the company's poor site search experience.
"If I had to describe what our site search was like in three words, it would be 'ancient and outdated.'"
The homegrown search lacked key features like spelling correction, synonyms, and the ability to determine what a customer was actually looking for when search terms weren't 100% clear.
This was no small problem — almost 70% of the company's website traffic used the search bar. The deeply flawed search was costing Noble Knight thousands of sales every year as customers hit dead end after dead end.
"We heard from a lot of customers that they were leaving our site and not converting because they couldn't find what they were looking for, even though they knew we carried certain products. Hearing that was incredibly frustrating."
The impact extended past the ecommerce team. Service staff were trained to educate customers on how to use the search bar, costing the business time and money. And despite hundreds of searches a day, Dan and his team had almost no data from these queries to help them optimize the experience.
"We'd run across product lines that just weren't selling, and we had a hunch it was because customers couldn't find the products," says Dan. "But we didn't know for sure because we didn't have the data or the visibility."
One of Dan's biggest priorities after joining the business 10 years ago was to overhaul the website, including the search experience. "We spent three months pretending we were Google," he says. "We made some improvements, but there were still very large gaps." Among them: the inability to deliver accurate results for any query that wasn't an exact match.
When negative customer feedback grew, the team began researching search vendors. Most had similar features and functionality, but lacked what Dan was really looking for — a true partner.
"We were looking for a vendor that could guide us through the entire implementation and integration into our website. We found that with Zoovu. Its white-glove implementation process was a big reason for choosing them."
While expertise and support were the primary reasons the Noble Knight team favored Zoovu, the platform also checked all the boxes for designing the perfect search experience. One capability that stood out was Zoovu's Data Platform, which helped Noble Knight harvest, search, digest, and transform technical product data into needs-based attributes on the fly.
Noble Knight was paired with a dedicated implementation team from Zoovu. After just six weeks, the team was ready to go live — on December 3, in the middle of the biggest shopping month of the year.
"I was extremely nervous," laughs Dan. "But it went really well. It was an extremely smooth launch."
"I can't think of anything that the other providers had that Zoovu didn't."
Here more about Dan's experience in Zoovu's Inside the Ultimate Guide to PDPs: How to Drive Confidence and Conversion webinar.
Noble Knight saw an immediate impact from its new and improved search experience.
"Our conversion rate increased by 30% overnight. Customers could find what they were looking for and weren't abandoning the site anymore."
Dan attributes this rapid success to having more control over the search experience without adding more work to the team's plate, including:
Noble Knight can now create new filters that guide customers to the right products faster. With over 30 people managing product data — and two programmers with "almost a decade of backlog" — the ability to create and modify attributes dynamically without extensive database updates was a game-changer.
Customers are now directed to products even when they use synonyms or misspelled words. Best of all, Dan's team doesn't manually add these alternates one by one — they're added automatically and can be adjusted if necessary.
Dan's team put gift cards as the first recommendation on the search bar — something they couldn't do in the past. They immediately saw a sharp increase in sales of gift cards.
"The software is super easy to use and very intuitive. Everything is set up so that if you do it once, you can do it a million times."
The benefits of Noble Knight's new search platform extend beyond conversions. The new insights Dan receives are particularly valuable — turning everyday search behavior into actions that improve the catalog, the experience, and the bottom line.
"Seeing our customers' search behavior is very powerful. Having that visibility is helping us improve our data and search. It's much better than in the past when we were blind to those things."
While the Noble Knight team has scored some big wins in a short time with Zoovu, they aren't close to done. Improving PLPs and a large data enrichment project are next on the to-do list — both of which will use Zoovu.
"If someone was considering working with Zoovu, even just a little bit, I would say do it now. Don't waste any time."
Noble Knight's success shows that smarter search and better data turn a sprawling catalog from a liability into your biggest advantage.
With Zoovu, every customer can find exactly what they came for, and a few things they didn't know they wanted.
If your shoppers can't find what they're looking for, Noble Knight's playbook is yours to follow.
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