Caleres' Vision for an Enhanced Ecommerce Digital Experience

 

In this compelling webinar hosted by Coveo, Craig Fels, Ecommerce Functional Analysis (Sitecore SME team) at Caleres and Mike Edwards, Senior Manager, Ecommerce and Catalog at Caleres walk viewers through the company's ecommerce transformation, focusing on one of their flagship brands — Famous Footwear.

 

While Caleres may not be a household name, they're the parent company of some well-known brands. Famous Footwear, their largest brand, has hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores and a significant ecommerce presence. In total, Caleres operates 12 ecommerce sites on their Sitecore and Coveo-powered platform.

 

 

In this presentation, Fels and Edwards provide insights on how Caleres pulled off a large ecommerce overhaul, using Coveo in conjunction with Sitecore to create a more effective and functional shopping experience across their diverse portfolio of footwear brands.

 

Roadblocks to Omnichannel Commerce Success

 

When Caleres began their ecommerce transformation in 2018, they faced several significant challenges. They started their transition with a few of their simpler, single-gender sites without brick-and-mortar stores including Easy Spirit, Franco Sarto, and Circus by Sam Edelman.

 

As they progressed to more complex brands, particularly Famous Footwear, the hurdles became more pronounced and included:

• Complex product catalog with numerous products across multiple categories and subcategories.
• Lack of robust personalization capabilities, a key feature needed in a digital marketplace.
• Existing onsite search relied heavily on manual rules, thus often failed to align with actual customer behavior and preferences.
• Lack of real-time inventory updates which meant shoppers would sometimes attempt to purchase items that weren't available.
• Couldn't create relationships between sellable items (e.g., linking different sizes and widths of the same shoe style.)
• Brick-and-mortar presence not integrated with their online platforms, a prerequisite for features like Buy Online, Pick Up in Store (BOPIS).

 

This last hurdle was particularly important, since they needed a system that could manage inventory across hundreds of physical locations while providing a unified "phygital" experience for customers who bounced from digital to physical channels as they shopped.

 

Connecting Online and In-Store Experiences

 

After launching simpler, single-gender sites and online-only stores in 2018, Caleres turned their focus to Famous Footwear in January 2021. The brand's size and complexity presented some unique challenges, the main one being the coordination of inventory across hundreds of locations needed to be synced with the ecommerce site.

 

 

 

Caleres worked with Coveo to create an hourly index that tracked all product variants, including size and width, across every store location. This real-time inventory system allowed customers to see exactly what was available at each store, enabling a truly integrated omnichannel shopping experience.

 

"We're sending to Coveo's hourly index all of the variants available to us," said Fels. "That includes all of the variants at that size and width level up to the Coveo catalog. This allows customers to see exactly what's available at every store in real-time."

 

This integration transformed Famous Footwear's shopping experience which included giving shoppers the ability to select multiple local stores when shopping on the website. The feature became a popular way for customers to compare inventory across different locations.

 

 

 

The team also implemented BOPIS which was supported by Coveo's commerce catalog to power the functionality. Caleres’s system makes a call out to Coveo to see if a particular shoe in a particular size is available at the shopper's store, so customers get the convenience of online shopping with the immediacy of local pick up.

 

Famous Footwear's omnichannel approach extends to product detail pages that display several delivery methods and in-store pickup options — an element that connects the online browsing experience to in-store fulfillment.

 

Leveraging Machine Learning for Personalized Shopping Experiences

 

In addition to stitching offline and online inventory availability into one unified experience, Caleres took advantage of Coveo's machine learning capabilities to make Famous Footwear's digital shopping experience more relevant for their customers. They implemented personalized product recommendations across the site, including the homepage, product detail pages, and shopping cart.

 

ML-powered query search suggestions were added to help customers find products more efficiently and guided navigation features on category pages gave shoppers even more control, allowing them to filter and refine a search based on preferences like size, color, and width.

 

Caleres then refined Coveo's out-of-the box ML models to improve relevancy by conducting A/B tests to make the models more purchase-aware. They ultimately shifted focus from clicks and views to actual buying behavior. The result? Higher click-through rates, lower average click positions and more relevant search results for shoppers.

 

What Omnichannel Shopping Success Looks Like

 

Using Coveo's AI-powered search and personalization capabilities to support Famous Footwear's omnichannel strategy was a resounding success. Some key improvements included:

• 24% increase in conversion rates for transactions involving search.
• 20% improvement in the average gap between customers who searched and those who didn't, a clear indication that search was a more effective tool for shoppers.
• Strong engagement with new features including faceted navigation and product recommendations

 

"Even when we don't see immediate changes in conversion, we're seeing strong engagement. Our customers are utilizing the facets and different tools available to them," said Edwards.

 

Fels added that during peak shopping periods, like the cyber seven days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, Famous Footwear handled massive traffic without issues. How massive? They processed 2.6 million queries, served 7.5 million recommendations, and managed 35.2 million usage analytics events.

 

"Our site really had no issues related to search during those cyber seven days, which highlights that Coveo was a great partner," said Fels. "Their system handled everything. We were able to serve up all of our pages and all of our searches to our customers with quick response times all day long on Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Cyber Monday without even blinking."

 

Learn how Caleres transformed their ecommerce experience with AI-powered search and personalization including a deep dive into how Coveo's technology helped Famous Footwear create a seamless omnichannel shopping experience. Register now to discover how you can leverage AI to enhance your digital customer experience and drive conversions.