Protest is a Dutch family company founded in 1993, that caters to beach visitors and starting and professional winter athletics. They also sell outdoor clothing outside the winter and summer seasons, as well as a cycling collection. Sales are going well, which is why Protest has grown significantly in recent years. They sell their clothing not only through wholesalers but on their own website, on various marketplaces, and in their own outlet stores.
Are you going for swimwear, a winter coat, or something from the cycling collection? With the help of Tweakwise, you will have found what you are looking for on their webshop in no time.
In early 2020, Protest developed a desire to optimize its search functionality. Their web shop had a built-in Site Search, but this search function slowed down, even though more and more customers wanted to use it. Therefore, Protest sought a best-of-breed solution to improve this functionality. They found it in Tweakwise’s Standard Site Search solution, implemented by their partner Emico in the new webshop they built. For an online store, good search functionality is very important because visitors who use this functionality are up to five times more likely to convert. With Tweakwise Site Search, Protest maintains control over search results. They show product and search suggestions, correct typos, recognize synonyms, and can include content pages in results.
Isabelle Heere, content manager and online merchandiser
In 2021, Protest started a new webshop, for which they are working with a Magento 2 backend. “The collaboration with Tweakwise intensified after implementing our new site. Emico (Protest’s web builder) created the Magento plug-in for Tweakwise so, this way, all the partners come together”, says Tom Luijten, e-commerce manager at Protest.
During the transition to the new webshop, Protest also upgraded one level with Tweakwise to Merchandising. “This switch has allowed us to be more flexible in our webshop,” says Tom. Merchandising is also known as the shelf layout of your shop and thus the most important tool for influencing customer behavior. You easily determine the sorting, filtering, product order and positions of products throughout your shop. “With the transition to a new season, the Merchandising tool is very valuable. New items will typically never be on top if you filter on ‘bestsellers’, but because we can change the order ourselves, a certain new jacket can be immediately visible for visitors. We can also manage the filters on the product landing pages ourselves, and we are creating a color layout so you can rank products by color,” adds Isabelle Heere, content manager and online merchandiser at Protest.
After using Merchandising, the move to Recommendations was also quickly made. With Recommendations, you can not only highlight products on the homepage, category pages, landing pages, and shopping cart, but you can also manage up-sell and cross-sell at the product detail level. Protest uses this tool to easily reflect the latest, most popular, or trending items in different places. “We make great use of showing alternative products based on the article viewed. If someone looked at a green sweater, this customer may also be interested in another sweater similar to this one. We show these alternative products based on specific product group characteristics. The benefit is that customers view more products and thus find what they are looking for faster”, says Isabelle. The algorithm takes a lot of work out of this. Using rules, this is automated, and you don’t have to set up alternative products for each product yourself.
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