We’ve always loved hearing about the successes of our customers and we are constantly amazed at what can be achieved with hard work and dedication. That’s why we became so excited when one of our users, Joel from the UK has reached out to us and agreed to an interview. This is the story of how Spares Hut managed to 10X their revenue while lowering the number of unsuccessful searches by 90% in their Shopify store.
Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Would you tell us a little bit about your business?
Our company, Spares Hut sells spare car parts across the UK. People love to buy from us because of our quality products, affordable prices and next-day delivery. When we’ve started out in 2012, we were mainly selling on Ebay and offline, but two years ago I had this idea to open our own Shopify store to increase our market share.
And you oversee the management of this Shopify store, right?
Exactly. I was heavily involved in developing the store and now I’m in charge of the management and our marketing. In the past year we have experienced a 10X growth, so I feel like we are on the right track.
You have been using Rapid Search for more than a year now. Why did you decide to change the built-in Shopify search bar?
Our store’s original search bar was just not cut out for our needs. Our visitors did not find what they were looking for because essential features, such as product recommendations and autocorrect were missing. After a couple of months, I realized that we had to do something about it. That’s when I started to look for alternatives.
Was Rapid Search your first pick?
Most of our competitors use so called Year/Make/Model search engines in their stores. These search engines search for specific spare parts based on the car’s manufacturing year, brand, and model. The problem with this is that we have thousands of products, and it would have taken forever to categorize all of them based on this system. That’s when I found Rapid Search in the Shopify app store.
Isn’t it a problem that Rapid Search doesn’t currently support the Year/Make/Model system?
Not at all! In fact, many of our customers are saying that it is easier to navigate in our store than in our competitors’. Your app uses machine-learning, right?
Correct.
So, a lot of positive feedbacks came from our customers, and that was the main reason why I contacted you.
Do you have a favourite feature in Rapid Search?
The correction of the misspelled search queries. Before we started using Rapid Search, around 20% of our searches did not produce results because of typos and misspellings. Now, it’s down to 2%.
That’s amazing.
I also liked the fact that I was able to tailor the design and placement of the search bar, so it matches our store’s look and feel. Our brand identity is something that’s really important to us and Rapid Search’s custom search bar allowed us to do just that.
Is there anything you would like to have changed in the app? Maybe a new feature idea?
I can’t think of anything at the moment. When we installed the app a year ago, we had a few minor customization requests – I talked with your support team and they were super helpful, solving the issues quickly. If something comes up in the future, I know I can contact you.
