Headquartered in Canberra

Founded in 2005

150+ stores

600+ team members

Elite Supplements is Australia’s leading sports nutrition retailer, with more than 150 stores and a growing international presence across Singapore, Dubai, and New Zealand. While brick-and-mortar retail remains the dominant revenue driver, ecommerce plays a critical role, especially for high-intent shoppers researching ingredients, comparing products, and making confident purchase decisions.

As the business expanded, so did expectations for its ecommerce experience. Customers rely heavily on search, but a fragmented setup and manual merchandising made it harder to deliver fast, relevant results. Modernizing search became essential to support growth and improve the online experience.

As Elite Supplements scaled its ecommerce business, the limitations of its existing setup became harder to ignore. Search and merchandising were powered by Unbxd, while recommendations were managed separately.

Each system worked in isolation, but they didn’t share context or learn from one another. As a result, customer intent captured in search wasn’t carried through to the rest of the experience.

A shopper could search for a product, but even when results surfaced, they were inconsistent, and any context disappeared as soon as they moved on. Category pages and recommendations didn’t reflect prior behavior, making it harder to guide customers toward the right products.

As Johan Nyberg, Chief Digital and Ecommerce Officer at Elite Supplements, explains, “search and merchandising didn’t talk to each other, which meant there was no continuity across the customer journey.”

As expectations shifted toward more adaptive, seamless experiences, it became clear that a more unified and intelligent approach to product discovery was needed.

Fragmented Discovery Experience
Search, category pages, and recommendations operated in silos. Customer intent captured in search was not reflected elsewhere on the site, creating a disconnected journey and limiting the effectiveness of personalization.

High Manual Merchandising Overhead
Product relevance didn’t happen naturally and had to be forced through manual effort. Teams spent significant time adjusting product ordering, managing rules, and reacting to underperforming results, making it difficult to scale. This reactive approach pulled focus away from higher-value optimization and testing.

Limited Ability to Test and Learn
Experimentation was constrained by tooling. The team lacked the ability to run more advanced A/B tests to validate merchandising strategies or compare performance against automated approaches, making it harder to confidently optimize the experience.

Elite Supplements selected Coveo to unify search, merchandising, and product discovery into a single, AI-driven platform.

Rather than managing separate systems, the team could now rely on a connected approach that continuously improves based on real customer behavior. The goal was not just to replace search, but to create a more consistent and adaptive experience across the entire journey.

Built on Shopify, Elite Supplements partnered with Material Plus to integrate Coveo into its ecommerce stack, bringing AI-driven search, listing pages, and recommendations together in a unified experience.

Elite Supplements moved quickly from decision to deployment. Working closely with their implementation partner, the team integrated Coveo into its Shopify environment, and despite the scope of the project, the full implementation was completed in under three months.

The rollout required coordination across Coveo, Material Plus, and Elite Supplements’ internal team, with a focus on getting the fundamentals right from the start. Once live, the system began learning from real customer behavior immediately, allowing relevance to improve without heavy manual tuning.

As Nyberg explains, “what stood out was how quickly everything came together, and how fast the system started improving once it was live.”

Improved Conversion & Engagement
Search is now performing as a true high-intent channel. Conversion rate from search increased by 29%, while engagement rose by 26%. More customers are using search, and more of those searches are turning into purchases.

Increased Order Value
Average order value increased by 6.9%, indicating that customers are not only finding products more easily, but are also building more valuable baskets as they move through the experience.

Reduced Manual Effort
AI-driven relevance has significantly reduced the need for manual merchandising. The system continuously refines results based on real customer behavior, allowing the team to shift focus from maintaining product ordering to improving the overall experience.

Smarter Optimization
With stronger testing capabilities, the team can now validate decisions with data. From product ranking strategies to category page improvements, insights from Coveo are helping guide more informed, measurable optimizations across the site.

Adopting AI-driven search required a shift in approach. Instead of relying heavily on manual rules and constant tuning, the team allowed the system to learn from real customer behavior. Early results didn’t always align with expectations, but the model adapted quickly.

Within the first day, search results began improving. Over the following weeks, the system refined relevance as it learned from how customers searched, clicked, and purchased.

This shift reduced the need for ongoing manual intervention while improving overall performance. Rather than managing the system day to day, the team could focus on guiding outcomes and improving the broader experience.

As Nyberg shares, “the biggest change for us was moving away from managing rules to letting the system learn and improve on its own.”

Elite Supplements is continuing to expand its use of Coveo, with a focus on both discovery and education.

A near-term priority is using Coveo’s SEO capabilities to generate landing pages from the product catalogue, helping answer common customer questions and improve organic discovery. In a category where product understanding plays a key role in purchase decisions, this is a natural extension.

Looking ahead, the team is exploring more conversational experiences, where customers can ask questions, compare products, and receive clear, relevant answers. That vision depends on having the right data in place.

Elite Supplements has been investing in that data foundation, working to enrich and structure product data across the catalogue. This includes transitioning from image-based nutrition panels to searchable text, enabling customers to find products based on specific ingredients and attributes.

As Nyberg notes, “the companies that are early adopters in this space and align their data will be the winners, with significant advantages.”