How the world’s largest online store for boardgames increased conversions by 30% with Zoovu AI Search

A big catalog spells big problems for Noble Knight Games and its search

Noble Knight Games’ biggest advantage, its massive product catalog, was also its biggest weakness.

Noble Knight’s claim to fame is offering the world’s largest selection of games—over 100,000 in total. This helped 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 in the impressive catalog. This 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“If I had to describe what our site search was like in three words, it would be, ‘ancient and outdated,’” says Dan Leeder, Vice President and Co-owner of Noble Knight Games.

It was homegrown and lacked a lot of key features like spelling correction, synonyms, and being able to determine what a customer was actually looking for even when the search terms weren’t 100% clear.

This was no small problem—almost 70% of the company’s website traffic used the search bar. This meant that 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 into sales because they couldn’t find what they were looking for, even though they knew we carried certain products” says Dan. “Hearing that was incredibly frustrating.”

The impact of the company’s search problems 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.

Despite these challenges, the site generated hundreds of searches a day. Unfortunately, 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.”

Finding a partner instead of just software

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,” says Dan remembering the project to revamp search. “And we made some improvements to our search, but there were still some very large gaps.”

Among those gaps was the inability to deliver accurate results (or any results) for any query that wasn’t an exact match for what was in the systems.

Dan knew it was time for a change when the team began receiving more and more negative feedback from customers.

“It was very hard to hear,” says Dan. “We finally said enough is enough and we started looking for a search provider to help us.”

The Noble Knight team conducted extensive research on search vendors, but while most had a similar set of features and function, most lacked what he 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,” says Dan.

We found that with Zoovu. Its white glove implementation process was a big reason for choosing them.

While its 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.

“I can’t think of anything that the other providers had that Zoovu didn’t.”

One capability that stood out to Dan was Zoovu’s Data Platform, which helped Noble Knight harvest, search, digest, and transform technical product data into needs-based attributes on the fly.

While technology projects are often stressful, Dan describes implementing Zoovu as exactly the opposite.

“The implementation was very smooth, especially for the size of our catalog and the amount of data changes we were asking for,” says Dan.

“We also have a lot of unique conditions on our products. It's not as straightforward as just buying a new T-shirt. It’s a very unique inventory situation and it presents a lot of challenges, but the Zoovu team rolled with it and helped solve those problems quickly and effectively.”

Noble Knight was paired with a dedicated implementation team from Zoovu. This team integrated the search platform into the look and feel of the Noble Knight website while looking for ways to improve the user experience and design.

After just six weeks, the Noble Knight team was ready to go live with its new search experience. Launch day was nerve-racking for Dan. It fell on December 3, right in the middle of the biggest shopping month of the year.

"I was extremely nervous,” laughs Dan, remembering the go-live day.

“But it went really well. It was an extremely smooth launch.”

Instant results, impressive insights, and value that extends past the search bar

Noble Knight saw an immediate impact from its new and improved search experience.

“Our conversion rate increased by 30% overnight,” says Dan. “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:

• The ability to quickly and easily enrich product data with attributes. This not only helped the company create new filters that guided customers to the right products faster, but it has also helped Dan’s team be more efficient. With over 30 people managing product data, including two programmers with “almost a decade of backlog,” the ability to create and modify attributes dynamically without extensive updates to their database was a game-changer.
• Being able to recognize alternate words, phrases, and spellings in search. Customers are now directed to products even if they use synonyms or misspelled words. Here’s the best part—it doesn’t require Dan’s team to manually add these alternate queries one by one. They’re added automatically and can be adjusted if necessary.
• Increased control over merchandising. For example, 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 gifts cards.

“The software is super easy to use and very intuitive,” says Dan. “Everything is set up so that if you do it once, you can do it a million times.”

The benefits that Noble Knight is seeing from their new search platform extend beyond conversions. The new insights Dan receives are particularly valuable.

“Seeing our customers' search behavior is very powerful,” says Dan. “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 its to-do list, both of which will use Zoovu. As he looks forward to these initiatives, Dan has advice for other ecommerce leaders.

“If someone was considering working with Zoovu, even just a little bit, I would say do it now,” he says.

“Don't waste any time.”