AWS for Industries
EyeBuyDirect Sees 29x ROI by Optimizing Product Recommendations with ViSenze
ViSenze Smart Recommendations allow EyeBuyDirect customers to easily discover the products they love.
Awareness is a key stage in the customer journey, especially when shoppers are browsing, searching, and exploring products for the perfect fit. But this stage can be cumbersome for online shoppers, who must navigate a sea of product options spread across large online catalogues.
To improve product discovery and provide the best customer experience, ecommerce retailers must curate the right product recommendations for the right customers at the right time, personalized to match each shopper’s purchase and browsing history. Retailers must also make their products more easily searchable online. This will allow customers to always find what they are looking for easily and quickly—even when missing keyword attributes. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) across their catalogues, retailers can now provide smart recommendations and fast, intuitive product search in order to delight customers and shorten the purchase path as shoppers discover every available option that could perfectly fit their needs.
EyeBuyDirect’s Mission to Improve Product Discoverability
EyeBuyDirect is a leading online retailer of prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses. Its mission is to improve lives by increasing the accessibility of quality eyewear for the 2.5 billion people living with uncorrected vision worldwide. EyeBuyDirect sells thousands of frame styles, ranging from classic to fashion-forward, and its products occupy several price points, thereby allowing customers to discover unique and budget-conscious styles.
In early 2020, EyeBuyDirect recognized an opportunity to improve its product recommendations engine. Its existing engine only displayed a small selection of similar products to shoppers. EyeBuyDirect strongly believed that it could significantly improve the discoverability of a wider frame selection by utilizing intelligent recommendations and search solutions powered by AI and ML.
ViSenze AI-Powered Smart Recommendations
EyeBuyDirect engaged ViSenze, an AWS Retail Competency Partner that helps retailers optimize each stage of the customer journey via intelligent search, personalization, and AI-powered recommendations.
EyeBuyDirect’sDirector of User Experience (UX), Alex Alekseev, spoke about the company’s previous product recommendations solution: “We had a solution for similar product recommendations, but it was pretty basic. It recommended products based on attributes alone, which was not optimal. Sometimes it would recommend frames with similar attributes—like shapes and colors—but the products weren’t actually that similar.” Because the recommended products weren’t exact matches, customer experience suffered, and EyeBuyDirect’s cross-selling and upselling became limited. Shoppers were only seeing a small selection of similar products and missing out on a wider frame selection that fit their personal styles. A more intelligent and scalable solution was needed.
In July 2020, EyeBuyDirect was ready to try something new. During a pilot phase, EyeBuyDirect deployed ViSenze Smart Recommendations in order to test its impact on UX. ViSenze worked with EyeBuyDirect to fine-tune the solution to meet its needs, and after one month EyeBuyDirect saw a nearly 20% increase in click-through rates.
Improving Results with Price Optimization
Later, ViSenze discovered trends showing that customers wanted to explore visually similar frames. These customers had a lower average order value because the engine was recommending lower-priced frames. To solve this, ViSenze helped EyeBuyDirect implement pricing logic into the recommendations engine in September. Over the next few weeks, EyeBuyDirect continued running tests and collecting data to find the sweet spot for generating higher conversion rates, all while uplifting the average order value.
By December, ViSenze and EyeBuyDirect had refined the logic so that the average overall session value among users exposed to similar products increased by 2.4% over the pre-solution rate. As of April 2021, the solution has increased annual revenue by $1.15 million on mobile alone.
Expanding Selection with Similar Style Recommendations
EyeBuyDirect launched its Similar Styles Results Pages in March 2021. Now, when customers click a frame style, four visually similar styles appear below the page’s hero image. Customers can even see every similar style, leading them to a unique page with dozens of potential frames at various price points. Never again will customers miss out on any of the EyeBuyDirect styles.
The Similar Styles Results Pages delivered top results by guiding customers to frame options matching their tastes. “We found that 2% of our traffic clicks this option,” said Alex. “That’s a big number. A shopper can click dozens of things on a product page, so that’s a high volume of people clicking.” The ViSenze- EyeBuyDirect partnership has opened many opportunities, and EyeBuyDirect has already seen a 29x return on investment after fine-tuning the ViSenze recommendation engine.
In the future, EyeBuyDirect plans to utilize visual intelligence to further enhance the customer experience with optimized, shoppable content within the company’s digital marketing materials. “Visual AI is a cool and fascinating technology,” Alex said. “It’s easy to see how it could be utilized in other industries beyond eyewear.”
Regarding EyeBuyDirect’s ViSenze experience, Alex notes, “I would recommend working with ViSenze because our relationship has been strong. They’ve helped us by developing new solutions based on our feedback, which has been great for us.”
Want to hear from the customer directly?
This panel discussion with EyeBuyDirect, ViSenze, and AWS focuses on accelerating retail sales through AI-Powered visual search and personalization at EyeBuyDirect.
And if you’re ready to unlock the power of AI and ML to transform your retail business, AWS is here to help. Contact your account team today to get started.
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ABOUT EYEBUYDIRECT
Roy Hessel founded EyeBuyDirect on the belief that quality eyewear should be accessible and affordable to everyone. The company’s vertically integrated approach means that everything is done in-house, from the concept to the design and manufacturing. EyeBuyDirect controls and oversees the entire process, allowing the company to pass savings on to customers without cutting corners or resorting to gimmicks.
ABOUT VISENZE
ViSenze is a fast-growing, global retail AI platform provider with solutions that redefine how retailers, brands, and marketplaces improve their businesses, both on the digital shop floor and behind the scenes. ViSenze Discovery Suite optimizes product discoverability, provides deep catalog intelligence, and drives contextually relevant ads so that customers can shorten the conversion path both online and in-store. To learn why the world’s top brands and retailers trust ViSenze, visit www.visenze.com.