Nosto Helps Industry West Furnish Shoppers with Personalization

Industry West provides a highly curated selection of furnishings from around the world for both residential and commercial use through its website and two brick-and-mortar stores—one in New York that opened early last year, and another in Jacksonville, Fla., that opened in 2018.

The 10-year-old company, founded by Jordan and Anne England in their backyard shed in Jacksonville, found early success in online retail, which still makes up the bulk of its business. The direct-to-consumer company grew quickly and soon began to realize that its current, out-of-the-box e-commerce platform was not maximizing its sales and revenue potential.

“We needed to optimize our site for better sales conversions,” says Ian Leslie, Industry West’s chief marketing officer. “We wanted better aesthetics and better online recommendations. The search function was not as smart and as efficient as we had hoped.”

Company officials first came into contact with Nosto, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered personalization platforms for digital commerce and retail, at an industry conference and liked what they saw. “Most of the other solutions were parts of larger products, including email and other features. We were looking for a [point] solution,” Leslie recalls

Industry West installed the Nosto software in late 2018, then added the personalization feature in 2019. The implementations were extremely simple, Leslie says, referring to Nosto as “a plug-and-play solution.”

Nosto uses advanced machine learning algorithms and other statistical techniques to predict and automatically deliver the most relevant shopping experiences to online visitors in real time. Nosto’s e-commerce personalization platform displays personalized product recommendations and automatically customizes website content to match the needs of individual visitors and visitor segments.

Since furniture/home decor is typically a high-consideration purchase, shoppers return to sites like Industry West’s repeatedly to look at images and find inspiration before making their final purchase decisions. As such, personalization was very important to Industry West.

With Nosto, the retailer customizes all of its onsite content—including banners, hero images, special offers, and product recommendations—to individual audience segments. No matter where shoppers are in their purchasing journeys, they see personalized content around what is most relevant to them; the software can even help returning website visitors pick up where they left off.

Repeat visitors who haven’t made purchases are presented with personalized “continue browsing” recommendations based on their past browsing histories. As they move through the buying process, the content they see becomes more product-specific to guide them toward an informed purchase.

Similarly, onsite content automatically changes to encourage future purchases from returning customers with hero and top banners presenting discounts and “quick ship” options.

Visitors who are completely new to the site receive a different set of recommendations, which are further segmented for corporate or consumer prospects.

The changes have brought huge returns for Industry West. The average online order has increased by 15 percent, and online revenue has climbed 8 percent. One quarter of all sales now come from the Nosto personalized content.

Additionally, the personalization feature is handled completely by the technology. Previously, company employees had to manually select and provide recommendations, according to Leslie. Those employees are now free to work on other company business.

“This is much more efficient than manually recommending products,” Leslie says.

“Partnering with Nosto has been critical to our online success; we see positive results everywhere we implement their solution. Nosto has been an incredible time-saver and has expanded our customization far beyond basic product recommendations. The platform itself is very user-friendly and provides helpful, granular insights on how campaigns are performing.”

Leslie expects Industry West to continue improving the product recommendations with the A/B testing feature that Nosto added recently. Further mining of customer interactions through the Nosto solution is expected to provide even greater increases in sales and revenue. 

The Payoff

Since implementing Nosto's personalization technology on its website, Industry West has seen the following results:

• a 15 percent increase in the amount of the average online order;
• an 8 percent increase in online revenue; and
• a complete automation of the recommendation process, freeing employees for other tasks.