Elevating Online Sporting Goods Sales with AdVonAI

Multiple sporting goods brands sought a solution to product data enrichment for the digital commerce sector of the largest brick-and-mortar retailer in the US. We helped them enrich nearly 95 thousand product listings, results in significant improvements in sales, discoverability, and retailer compliance. Here’s what they were facing:

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Challenges

Market Stagnation

The online sporting goods market is seeing minimal growth, with only a 0.4% year-over-year increase in online sales and 1.7% growth when including brick-and-mortar. This stagnation presents a challenge for brands looking to expand their online presence.

The online sporting goods market is still adjusting post-Covid, with online sales slightly shrinking from 2021 to 2022. Many shoppers have returned to making in-store purchases, making the online market volatile and difficult to read. Inflation is also a leading cause of stagnation due to buyers’ reluctance to spend money on non-essential items.

Some product types are still seeing positive growth, with sportswear seeing 8-10% growth. Overall, the sporting goods catalog has seen low performance with a need for updates that target consumers and growth.  

Demographic Concentration

More than 23% of sales are sporting goods sales are attributed to 25-34 age demographic. Each year this range gets more concentrated and made up of digital natives. As it continues to grow, targeting younger generations and audience with tech-savvy shopping habits will be key.

Solution: AdVonAI

The brands used AdVonAI to enrich a catalog of 93,673 products. Catalogs this large typically take months or even years to enrich the entire catalog, but by using human-driven LLMs, the process was completed in under a month. With a stagnant market, it was necessary for the brands to target every side of their marketing strategy. Making sure that every product listing has fleshed out specs and relevant attributes makes sure that conversion isn’t lost. Let’s look at the results:

Discoverability

Updating the product attributes led to a significant increase in rankings for top keywords and discoverability across the catalog.

  • Over 3,000 products received new top 100 placements resulting in over 30% increase in top placements
  • The average search rank improved by 26 positions (that’s nearly 2 pages!)

Retailer Compliance

Improving quality score improves eligibility for paid placements, organic search rankings, and possibility of being featured by the retailer. The brands saw a significant improvement on 94% of items.

  • Average quality score increased to 77%, a 17.6% marking a 60% improvement on nearly 90,000 products
  • Over 8,000 items achieved a quality score above 90%, which a thousand percent increase from the previous metric. 

Sales

Following the enrichment, the brand saw a remarkable 67% increase in average daily sales during both peak season (October-December) as well as off-season sales. 

  • The brands saw $600,000 in additional average daily sales 
  • Over 60 days, they saw a $17 million lift in revenue 

Interested in these results? We offer tailored AI solutions so you can compete and convert without compromise. 

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What does this mean for the retailer? 

We know that when brands win, so does the retailer. Increased conversion puts money in everyone’s pocket. And since our AI follows each retailer’s unique guidelines, it creates a more concise and compliant catalog for the retailer. 

$600,000

Average Daily Sales

$17,000,000

Lift in revenue after 60 days

8,000

Items with greater than 90% quality score

Solutions Used

Product attributes are, by definition, the defining feature of products. When consumers are searching, they do so by attributes. Size, weight, durability, number of pieces, etc. These are what consumers use to find products, whether through organic search, or through filtering on an online retailer. AdVon uses AI and human-in-the-loop verification to make sure that all your data is utilized so that the most products meets the most purchasers.

An Advon catalog audit pulls out all the information needed to diagnose and treat your catalog. We look at the number of missing attributes, and taxonomy shortcomings to determine where consumers are falling through the cracks. Don't lose more customers due to bad data.

Enhance visibility and searchability of category specific search. Lead high intent buyers into longtail opportunities that lead to the products they want, the first time. In years past it was often too time intensive and expensive to build campaigns with this level of detail. AdVon optimizes whole catalogs in days not weeks or years.

Optimizing category pages and individual product listings improves search engine rankings, making it easier for customers to discover products. Capture "new-to-brand" customers, as well as increasing repeat purchases with content reaches your target audience.

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