Online loungewear and sleepwear bran Chelsea Peers has more than doubled the likelihood that shoppers of its ‘all pyjamas’ and ‘long pyjamas’ collections will make a purchase when they land on category pages. The retailer is using Nosto’s Commerce Experience Platform to tailor the shopping experience to customers looking for curve and maternity PJs.
Chelsea Peers is a UK-based, direct-to-consumer fashion brand that sells online, as well as through retailers such as ASOS and Next. It is using Nosto’s AI-powered Category Merchandising to automatically optimize the way it displays and ranks products on category pages in real time to appeal to specific customer segments. Nosto relies on self-learning algorithms to decide which products to show, where on the page they should sit, and in which order.
Initial focus on curve and maternity segments
The initial focus has been on personalizing All Pyjamas and Long Pyjamas category pages, to better target segments with a high affinity to curve and maternity-sized pieces, as well as two important segments based on lifecycle stage: returning visitors and prospects (prospects are first-time visitors determined to be very close or likely to buy).
Nosto automatically identifies visitors that fit into one of these four segments based on their on-site behavior and tailors the way products are arranged on category pages to suit. As a result, All Pyjamas shoppers are now 2.25x more likely, on average, to make a purchase, while Long Pyjamas shoppers are now 2.5x more likely.
Archie Hudson-Rawlings, Junior E-commerce Manager at Chelsea Peers, commented: “We target a wide demographic—young and old—all with different tastes and requirements. Category merchandising can help us ensure that the first products people see will be those they’re most interested in. They’ll also be products in stock, performing well and available in the size they want, so we’re not wasting shoppers’ time and are avoiding putting roadblocks on their shopping journey.”
Promoting inclusivity
Promoting inclusivity is an important aspect of the Chelsea Peers brand, which is why customers with affinities for curve and maternity sizes were among the earliest segments chosen for category merchandising.
“There are people out there that feel that they can’t just go to a website and buy what they want because of their size—and we want to change this,” said Hudson-Rawlings. “For example, we’ve invested in making all our products available up to size 28. And tools such as Nosto’s Category Merchandising can help ensure that customers with an affinity to curve sizes will see those items as soon as possible.”
Around 70% of Chelsea Peers’ sales come via mobile which means Category Merchandising can play an even more significant role in helping shoppers find what they want, according to Hudson-Rawlings: “On the smaller mobile screen, it’s harder to see everything. So, the order and placement of products on the category page are key. Some people don’t even scroll to below the fold on mobile, so if they don’t see what they’re interested in immediately, there’s a chance they’ll click away.”
Chelsea Peers has since rolled out Category Merchandising to a broader range of products, going beyond All Pyjamas and Long Pyjamas collections, which it chose first because they are among its top-selling collections. The company also plans to identify and target other customer segments including those with affinities to different product attributes such as whether they are looking for certain colors or crew-neck or button-up pyjamas, for example.
“Before Nosto, we were just manually merchandising based on sales, inventory, high-performing products and so on,” said Hudson-Rawlings. “However, we sell 200-plus products online and to manage that—and all collections across men’s, women’s, kids, swimwear, loungewear, and pyjamas—would simply take too long. Plus, doing it manually, we wouldn’t be able to do it as powerfully as Nosto. It’s a no-brainer.”
In addition to Category Merchandising, Chelsea Peers is also using Nosto to tailor home page product recommendations to specific customer segments.
