Deb Shops is driving key mobile commerce metrics such as revenue per visitor by enhancing the on-site experience for its mobile Web site to make it easier for users to find items of interest.

The retailer launched its first dedicated mobile Web site in the second quarter of 2012 in response to the growing percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices. With more than 50 percent of traffic coming from mobile on some days, the merchant launched a redesign of the site in early 2013 focusing on enhancing the search experience.

“Mobile phones are fundamentally search and communication devices,” said Joelle Kaufman, head of marketing for BloomReach, Mountain View, CA. “Consumers use their mobile phones to research products, prices and locations.

“Deb Shops recognized that there are many ways consumers ‘search’ – they search by typing phrases, by exploring related products, by engaging with social media – and with BloomReach Mobile, Deb Shops incorporated all those experiences into their mobile site for a more relevant, engaging and productive mobile experience,” she said.

Deb Shops offers trendy fashions at good prices to young women between 13 and 24 years old at approximately 300 store locations and online.

Personalized dynamic categories
Deb Shops is taking advantage of BloomReach Mobile, which was launched yesterday as a cross-channel-optimized mobile search and discovery solution. The offering leverages the collective intelligence of both the Web and individual sites to match content with user intent.

Driving mcommerce results can be challenging because of the small screen sizes in mobile and the fact that users are often shopping in between other activities while they have a few minutes, making it critical that they find what they are looking for quickly.

Deb Shops recognized that enhancing search capabilities for its mobile site could help it gain market share and drive results. The merchant teamed with BloomReach to help shoppers find what they want as quickly as possible using multiple discovery pathways with the idea of being able to show users items of interest in the five to ten minutes that they are shopping on the site.

The new features on the Deb Shops site include Auto Suggest, Predictive Results, More Like This and What’s Hot, which showcases trending Pinned and Liked items.

Leveraging each shopper’s cross-channel behavior, BloomReach Mobile automatically creates personalized dynamic categories that group products that are relevant to that shopper based on shared product attributes such as brand, color, style, category and a shopper’s preference for on-sale items, pins and likes.

Auto-suggestions and predictive search use big data collected daily from 150 million Web pages and more than a billion consumer interactions to suggest contextual phrases from only one to two characters and showing relevant products based on consumer intent and mobile site content.

Mobile discovery
Since BloomReach Mobile went live on the Deb Shops site, the merchant has seen increasing use of the on-site search features, with 67 percent of search users exploring products via Auto Suggest.

Deb Shops has also seen an increase in revenue per visitor, with revenue per visitor from What’s Hot 170 percent greater than non-trending users.

The merchant has also seen a 20 percent increase in add to cart for users exploring with More Like This.

“Mobile discovery is not just text search – it’s visual browsing, social and cross-channel content,” Ms. Kaufman said.

“Incorporating those necessary capabilities and ensuring that they deliver the best experience to your consumers is challenging in a fight for time and prioritization, so a cloud-based Big Data application like BloomReach Mobile is both a technologically and operationally scalable solution.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York