Impact of tagging on sales – Kitamura camera 3 months case study

The impact of tagging on sales for Kitamura camera was 213% more sales for tagged items compared to the non tagged items at the same period of time. Even higher positive gap observed in page views and unique users KPIs.

INTRODUCTION

Site navigation or faceted search is a must-have element on any online store. Depending on the number of products the store offers, sellers must give their customers the option to narrow down search results to a manageable number, containing only products that are relevant to them. Using site navigation, customers can zero in on the product they want to buy, by selecting the attributes that define this product.

For faceted search  to work properly, and provide the best customer experience, each product in the store must be fully tagged with the attribute values relevant to this product. 

Kitamura camera started to use the Xtag solution provided by Lisuto in order to improve the level of tagging of Kitamura camera listings on Rakuten marketplace. The basic assumption was that higher level of tagging will improve the customer experience and drive main business KPIs -  sales, page access numbers and new users numbers.

2 month after the deployment and the initial use,  Lisuto cooperated with Kitamura camera to conduct a 3-months comparative case study to verify the impact of the tagging process on 3 main business parameters. 

The results of the case study clearly point to the major impact navigational tagging has on products’ performance. The results demonstrate that tagged products consistently outperform untagged products in all three of the key metrics: sales, page access numbers and the number of new users.

METHODOLOGY

The case study’s main goal was to identify and measure the impact of tagging on sales, page access numbers and the number of new users. In the framework of the case study, Lisuto has received the information about the top 1000 Kitamura’s products throughout a test period of three months, from November 2020 to January 2021. The set of products that consistently appeared in the top 1000 in all 3 of the test months was included in the study. This set of products contained 2 subsets -  a subset of tagged products and a subset of untagged products.  The performance of the products in both subsets one month prior to tagging served as the benchmark for the study.

THE STUDY

Sales

Total Sales

In terms of sales, the results are crystal clear. It is obvious that December was a great month for Kitamura camera, with increased sales in comparison to November. Still, tagged products outperform untagged products, by increasing sales numbers in over 40%. Almost double the increase untagged products experienced. 

Although not as great as December, January also showed an increase in the overall sales numbers. But once again, while untagged products barely moved at 2.3%, tagged products, quadrupled that number at 10.5%.

These numbers show the distinct advantage of tagged products over untagged products in promoting sales.  

Page Views

Page Views

The results of the page views numbers are consistent with the sales. Again, December saw a large increase in the page access numbers for both types of products. However, tagged products again doubled the performance of untagged products. While untagged products’ page access numbers jumped almost 20%, tagged products increased their page access numbers by almost 50%. 

The same goes for January, when the page access numbers increased more than 20% relative to November, while untagged products increased only by about 9%. 

The page views results reinforce the conclusion of the sales numbers - tagged products perform significantly better than untagged products.

Unique users

Unique users

Unique users numbers also reflect the superiority of tagged products. In December, tagged products enjoyed an increase of more than 46% in the number of new users visiting the product pages, compared to a month before. Untagged products experience an increase as well, but only of about 19%. 

In January, again both types of products experienced an increase in new users numbers, however, tagged products, at almost 20%, outperformed untagged products, at 9%. 

In terms of new users numbers, tagged products once again demonstrated their advantage over untagged products. 

CONCLUSIONS

Since products tagging makes the products much more visible and findable to the customers, it makes sense that the tagging improved the metrics we examined: sales, page views numbers and the number of unique users. This case study clearly demonstrates the Kitamura camera products that were tagged by Xtag exhibited a significant positive impact on all three major business KPIs. These observations are consistent without previous studies on Bic camera, Jwell and other multiple studies.

The impact of tagging on sales for Kitamura camera was 213% on the sales and more than double page views and unique users, compared to the non tagged products at the same period of time. The clear conclusion is that not only product tagging is very effective, product tagging is the fastest and the most cost effective way to consistently drive the business performance on marketplaces and ecommerce sites.