Success Stories

How Booktopia drives sales conversions with onsite category optimization and recommendations

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About Booktopia

Booktopia was founded in 2004, in Sydney Australia, and operates an entirely online model of book sales. By 2010 Booktopia’s revenue was north of $10 million per year. In 2020, ASX listed the company with a market capitalization of $315 million. Today, Booktopia ships over 2,000,000 packages a year to Australian addresses containing books, DVDs, CDs, maps, and other products — fast becoming the local bookstore for all Australians.
Executive Summary

Booktopia’s earlier recommendations model depended on their team manually aggregating their recommendations list, news, and bestsellers. They were looking for technology that would remove time-consuming human interventions and help their UX team design better discovery experiences for their customers.

Insider’s granular segmentation capability was a deciding factor. Booktopia tried and tested the robustness of this feature and was able to develop various product recommendations and was pleased with the results. Booktopia also wanted to test changes and variations to their onsite UX, and Insider’s technology perfectly fit the bill. They were also impressed by the knowledge and expertise of the account management team.

Booktopia preferred Insider over the other vendors because of the solution’s existing advanced product recommendations and tailor-made recommendation strategies for the desktop and mobile web. Along with advanced recommendations, Insider also provides micro-segmentation, which helped Booktopia get  granular with targeting and engagement. Insider’s A/B testing is another feature that made a deep impression on the Booktopita team — especially Insider’s fast execution. 

Insider’s platform also enabled Booktopia to unify its mobile and desktop strategies to create holistic, individualized experiences across channels. The all-around account management support and operational efficiency meant that Booktopia could execute faster go-to-market plans and dynamic personalization strategies, which helped the brand build trust and a deeply loyal customer base.

Improving user experience and creating a customized category list with Category Optimizer

As an online bookstore, Booktopia has an extensive list of categories, making it a challenge to customize them for their multiple user segments. Booktopia wanted a way to personalize these categories for different users at speed and scale. 

The team at Insider suggested personalizing the category titles based on the user's previous sessions. Booktopia customized their category list order, and with dynamic attributes, were able to help users reach the related products faster. Booktopia also implemented this solution across different pages and dynamically changed the customizations based on season and their current bestsellers.

Booktopia increased sales and saw a conversion rate uplift of 2.01% through a better onsite experience.

Optimizing the product discovery experience with improved product recommendations

Booktopia wanted to enhance the user experience further and cater to the broader interests of their audiences. They needed a solution that could suggest relevant products (books) to their customers. 

Having understood Booktopia’s vision, Insider’s growth consultants suggested implementing dynamic AI-backed recommendations on the product page. The recommendations would display “Viewed Together” products on the product detail page on desktop and mobile web.

As a result, Booktopia achieved a sales conversion rate uplift of 3.64% on desktop and a 2.52% uplift on mobile web.

AI-powered Segmentation Combined with Classic Offers to Boost Revenue

M&S combines Insider’s web push messaging and AI-powered segmentation tools with their most successful “always on” campaigns. Insider’s Growth Management Platform tracks the category or collection that a visitor was most recently browsing but did not convert and entices them back with a timely promotion. A particularly successful example is M&S’s long running 4 pairs for 3 women’s underwear campaign, boosting lingerie conversion rates and revenue.

Looking Ahead

Booktopia will expand new products and service offerings and will look to Insider’s robust segmentation and recommendations to boost conversions and deliver top-notch user experiences. Booktopia is also considering integrating WhatsApp Business API for shipping updates.

Another area of interest for Booktopia is optimizing cart recovery & browser abandonment.  The company is looking to Insider’s Architect to power personalized cart abandonment web push — combined with deeper segmentation and CRM persona alignment — to deliver relevant web push experiences proven to bring users back and reduce abandonment rates.

To keep up with their growing categories and genres, Booktopia is considering Insider’s new Smart Recommender algorithms to enable smoother product discovery and contextualized product recommendations.

Flexibility, personalisation, and performance

“We enjoy working with Insider because they value our feedback and are proactive in developing features above the standard offering, based on our needs. The A/B testing available for campaigns is a great feature that has enabled us to experiment and identify best performing variations to drive optimal results. 

Insider's product discovery solutions combined with their segmentation capabilities has helped us achieve more than a 3.6% uplift in conversions. The platform has so much more to offer and we are looking forward to exploring that!”

Wayne Baskin

Deputy CEO, CTO

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