Fredhopper User Group session at foryouandyourcustomers in Melbourne

Fabian Engeln | 24. June 2019

#Contemporary Business #Contextual Commerce

A hands-on workshop to share best practices, knowledge and experiences about the topics search, merchandising, targeting and personalisation concepts. A main focus topic was the Fredhopper Experience Platform.

The onsite search and merchandising solution Fredhopper from Attraqt offers powerful functionalities. How can Fredhopper users learn about new ways to use that tool, implement industry best practices and improve the search processes in their companies? These questions were addressed during the hands-on workshop in Melbourne. Fabian Engeln from foryouandyourcustomers and Peter Grzegorek from Attraqt led the interactive discussion and shared best practices they have identified over years of working with Fredhopper.

Participants from the different retailing industries like premium homeware, fashion, beverages, footwear and others were joining to hear about Fredhopper topics. Our event started with a quick introduction of foryouandyourcustomers and our services from our Australian CEO Bernhard Mueller. Russell Godin, regional director from Attraqt, explained the purpose of the session and the deep relationship between foryouandyourcustomers and Attraqt.

Introduction from Bernhard Mueller, CEO foryouandyourcustomers Melbourne.

Best practices in Fredhopper functionalities

Every retailer utilising Fredhopper can have their own custom implementation. The needs to the business determine the desired use cases for Fredhopper and thus its implementation. However, there are also certain best practices which every retailer should offer to provide a solid user experience to their customers. After an initial introduction, Fabian commenced the session by showing different examples of Fredhopper’s use by various European companies, and shared how they integrated Fredhopper’s capabilities on their website.

Various suggest types

Various suggest types, such as keywords, recent searches or products, can be offered to customers to inspire and support their browsing on the website. Many different data sources and types can be utilised. „Bakker even has integrated content article suggestions into their suggest which they found to be very useful for their customers“ said Fabian.

Search optimisation and configuration

Having a basic search configuration is vital, but also continuously optimising search via custom reports in Google data studio and synonyms, as well as redirects can significantly improve conversion. Fabian then showed an example from SportScheck, where customers might search using two independent terms. Customers then get the possibility to choose how to continue with their customer journey via two separate product lists. Peter added another example for a sophisticated search integration: „Petbarn shows two tabs in search results, one for products, one for contents“.

Workshop discussion about ranking factors that improve customer experience.

Peter added another example for a sophisticated search integration: „Petbarn shows two tabs in search results, one for products, one for contents“.

Merchandising and personalisation

When the discussion was about personalisation, one of the participants shared how they use merchandising in product lists and utilise product recommendations. They utilised visual recommendations from Fredhopper on product detail pages as „you may also like“ recommendations. That offered their customers valuable alternatives for the item that they shopped without having the need to manually create complicated business rules in Fredhopper.

Ranking factors

In the area of rankings, another company shared that they especially leverage the Fredhopper Ranking Cocktail functionality which allows them to create custom rankings for sales periods and combine them with other commercial factors like unit sales. Fabian added that it is also possible to generate further custom ranking attributes like season attributes which automatically determine which products should be pushed to the top of a product list based on the current season. Another example was the use of predictive sales attributes based on the data from the last year in the next 30 days. „This should only be used when seasonal sales patterns can clearly be identified after a thorough data analysis“ clarified Fabian.

Some workshop participants commented that they hadn’t thought of these ways to utilise automatic algorithms to improve customer experience.

Workshop conclusion

Following the hands-on workshop, the participants also joined the networking session and exchanged ideas with Attraqt, foryouandyourcustomers and the other workshop participants. Many of the participants were especially interested in how to build up a search capability with the right tools and processes to be able to better operate the Fredhopper solution. We shared our model for helping customers to establish a mature search optimisation capability. At foryouandyourcustomers, we were particularly delighted that there was so much positive feedback about the learning that could be achieved and that new contacts could be established.