Case Study
Retail Chain
"Webhallen always strives to improve the customer experience and with Loop54 as a partner for search we can create an even better user experience online resulting in an increase in revenue, but most importantly resulting in higher relevance leading to more satisfied customers"
Fredrik Lindblad,
CMO and Head of Online, Webhallen
Webhallen Sverige was founded in 1999 in a small apartment in central Stockholm and has within a short amount of time grown to become one of Sweden’s leading retailers within hardware, consumer electronics, gadgets, and games.
Always focused on thinking big and making life easier for their customers, Webhallen was one of the first online stores in Sweden that showed their stock balance on their website as well as offering an innovative click and collect shopping experience. Webhallen also was the first bigger Swedish player accepting the crypto currency bitcoin for payments.
Today Webhallen has 20 physical stores spanning from Malmö to Uppsala, as well as their online store and sales via mail order. In 2019, they had an annual revenue of 2.1 billion Swedish Crowns.
Despite their growth, Webhallen are holding on to their roots as tech and gaming enthusiasts, to use their passion and knowledge to help customers make the right decisions.
The Swedish consumer electronics market is a highly competitive environment with tight margins. In addition to competition from big national, Nordic and international hybrid players that run both physical and eCommerce stores in Sweden, Webhallen is also facing fierce competition from online-only stores both from Sweden and abroad.
Even though eCommerce has been the core of Webhallen’s business from the start, continuous improvements and investments in the customers experience are essential to stay competitive in an industry were online sales are seeing the biggest growth.
Before Loop54, Webhallen used Elasticsearch to power their search function. While this solution gave them great flexibility in customizing the search experience on their site, it also demanded a lot of resources to fine-tune the results. Ultimately, manually maintaining the high level of relevancy in search results became too time-consuming, and Webhallen started looking for a less hands-on solution.
Part of the challenge was to find a solution that could handle the complexity of Webhallen’s product catalogue with over 20 000 products. The new solution also had to support Webhallen’s instant search function that shows a dropdown list with direct product results for the search, including information on price and stock balance. This was especially appreciated by in-store staff that also used the website search when looking up products.
Webhallen had invested considerable time in fine-tuning their previous search solution. For them to bring in a new search partner, the following criteria had to be met:
Loop54 also had an advantage over Webhallen’s previous solution by being designed specifically for eCommerce:
Webhallen ran an a/b test against their existing solution to be able to assess the effect of Loop54’s search. During the test, Loop54 could increase the session value for customers that used search with 8% as well as increasing the value per search by 9.8%.
In addition to the increase in revenues, Loop54 also made a difference for the customer experience. The amount of results viewed per search decreased by 20%, indicating that customers were faster able to find what they were looking for.
Webhallen always strive to improve the customer experience and with Loop54 as a partner for search we can create an even better user experience online resulting in an increase in revenue, but most importantly resulting in higher relevance leading to more satisfied customers.”
Fredrik Lindblad,
CMO and Head of Online, Webhallen
Shoppers expect the same level of relevance and personalisation online as they experience in-store. Powered by Machine Learning and built exclusively for eCommerce, Loop54 delivers that exceptional online shopping experience.