The impact of tagging on an online jewelry retailer

The impact of tagging on a online jewelry retailer - Jwell, selling on Rakuten marketplace is very significant, especially for just one month: 

•     Sales increase of 31%
•     Pageviews increase by 22%
•     21% more unique users

Jwell is a major Japanese retailer, which operates an online store on the largest Japanese marketplace - Rakuten. Jwell online jewelry store offers tens of thousands of products, ranging from rings and necklaces, to lucrative pens and cufflinks. Jwell was looking for a way to enhance its product exposure, attract more customers and increase sales. Lisuto was asked to assist to reach these goals by improving Jwell product discoverability on Rakuten. Initial analysis demonstrated that the level of product data tagging on the marketplace is low and increase of tagging coverage has a high potential to achieve increase in sales. One month after the products were tagged and uploaded, at a request of  Jwell, Lisuto conducted a case study, to validate our assumptions and measure the impact of the implemented solution.

Tagging is the process by which products in online stores are “tagged” in accordance to their different attributes (such as color, brand, size etc.), which in turn helps expose the products in the process of faceted search using site navigation.

The main goal of the case study was to examine the effects of navigational tags on the sales, pageviews and number of unique users.

Methodology

The case study has been conducted over a period of two months, October and November 2020. October, during which no product has been tagged, served as the benchmark, and November served as the test months, after the products were tagged. For the case study Lisuto only the top 1,000 most viewed products throughout the entire test period and examined 709 products that appeared in top 1000 on both the month before the tagging was performed and after the tagging was completed. Out of 709 products 477 were tagged and the other 232 were not tagged and served as a control group for this case study. This approach of examining the tagged and untagged products in the same popularity group and the same time periods eliminated the possible biases, specifically seasonality bias.

The Study

Sales

Total Sales

The sales numbers bore out our assumption, that tagging increases the product’s performance. As the table clearly demonstrates, in November, following the tagging process, tagged products’ sales totals grew by more than 30%, within one month.

While the tagged products enjoyed a significant increase, untagged products suffered a major decline in sales during the same period, which attests to the positive impact of tagging.

Page Views

Page Views

The pageviews numbers also show clearly the advantages of tagged products performance over untagged ones. Like with the sales, once tagged, the products pageviews increased by more than 20%. This is a significant increase in the products’ exposure. Untagged products, in comparison, experienced a slight drop in pageviews, although not as steep as they experienced in sales during the same month. 

Unique users

Unique users

Not surprisingly, the results for unique users numbers indicate a similar trend. While tagged products enjoyed another noteworthy increase in the number of unique users visits, untagged products did not do so well, attracting less unique users than the previous month.

Conclusions

The results of the case study confirmed our initial assumption regarding  the impact of tagging on a online jewelry retailer. One of the best ways to increase exposure and sales is to effectively tag the products on a marketplace or any other online platform. In a single month, Jwell’s tagged products:

•     Enjoyed a sales increase of 31%
•     Increased pageviews by 22%
•     Attracted 21% more unique users