Impact of text tagging on sales – Xebio 3 months case study

The impact of text tagging on sales for Xebio was 49% more sales for tagged items compared to the non tagged items at the same period of time. Similar positive gap observed in page views and unique users KPIs.

INTRODUCTION

When ecommerce customers visit an online store, they expect to be able to find what they are looking for, quickly and easily. In order to provide such user experience, a search is no longer enough (especially if you consider that most ecommerce customers are “browsers”). Site navigation has become the standard in online stores, and this is the tool that helps customers zero in on their products of interest. By allowing customers to narrow down results by selecting attributes and values, they can quickly find what they are looking for, which greatly improves user experience.  

Xebio sports is a leading Japanese sporting goods and apparel chain, with hundreds of stores in Japan and around the world. In addition to regular stores, Xebio sports sells its products both through their own branded online store, and through Rakuten. At the end of last year, Xebio wanted to improve its products’ performance on Rakuten and engaged Lisuto to help tag their products with navigational tags. Xebio sports undertook this action with the assumption that tagging the products would improve products’ performance in three significant key performance indicators: sales, page access numbers and unique users sales numbers. 

Xebio sports have tagged over 16K products out the total volume of over 70K products on Rakuten and asked to conduct a case study on the performance. 

The case study period covered November 2020, prior to any product tagging and continued through December 2020 and January 2021, after the products have been tagged with Xtag. 

The results of the case study clearly confirmed the assumption in each of the performance indicators we examined and demonstrated that the business performance of tagged products is superior compared to the untagged products

METHODOLOGY

Over the three months study period, November served as the benchmark for December and January, since no products were tagged before or during November. Only the top 1,000 most viewed products during the test period were included in the study. Lisuto used the top 1,000 most viewed untagged products as a control group for the test period.

THE STUDY

Sales

Total Sales

The results for sales demonstrate the advantages of tagging. In December, tagged products’ sales increased by more than 30% compared to November, while at the same time, untagged products’ sales dropped by almost 12%. 

In January, untagged products’ sales experienced a sharp decline of almost 50%, but tagged products remained resilient and managed to increase its sales by more than 9%. 

Page Views

Page Views

Pages access numbers provide more evidence to the superiority of tagged products. In December, tagged products once again outperformed untagged products, increasing page access numbers by 13%, compared to untagged products, which experienced a decline at the same month.

The difference tagging makes was clear in January. Tagged products’ page access numbers jumped by 20%, while untagged products numbers fell by 15%.    

Unique users

Unique users

The unique users results almost mirror the page access numbers. In December, the number of unique users who purchased tagged products increased by 12.5% compared to November. In comparison, untagged products lost some unique users compared to November. 

Once again January sees a spike in tagged products unique access numbers, increasing by 20%. The untagged products, on the other hand, dropped down by more than 14% in the same month. 

CONCLUSIONS

This case study continues the trend of prior test case studies Lisuto has conducted, such as study with the fashion retailer Right-on and camera and electronics retailer Kitamura camera, and corroborates the thesis that tagging gives a significant advantage to products, compared to untagged products. While untagged products dropped in every parameter we examined, tagged products enjoyed significant increases.  

We, therefore, see that text tagging products have a very significant positive impact on key performance indicators, such as sales and page access numbers. That is why investing in text tagging your products is the smartest investment you can make.