Improving customer engagement
The speed of search was so good, Jiang says, that Culture Kings’ in-store sales reps and customer experience team have gravitated to using it for their own searches. While his team hasn’t created an internal tool for search, it has implemented keywords for CX or sales such as product codes.
“If you walk into the bricks-and-mortar store and need something, you’d never be able to find it as fast as you could online,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of feedback where the customer has — while in the store or being helped by sales on their phone — been able to quickly find what they are looking for online.”
The e-commerce merchandising team also benefits from having a search platform that’s easy for them to update, while leadership finds it easier to check what is latest and greatest on the site and use analytics to see what improvements can be made in their offerings.

Merchandising is using Algolia to boost collections through Rules on the site without having to manually create temporary collections.
The business uses Algolia A/B Testing to optimize collections and sorting based on different customer journeys; for example, a buyer isn’t necessarily going to shop for sneakers the way they would for jewelry.
“People use Algolia now for all sorts of things on the business side, just because it’s so easy to find what they want to,” Jiang notes.
But perhaps the biggest benefit is that experienced by the customers, which can be seen in the increases Culture Kings has seen in its KPIs. Ninety percent of customers are able to get their search results in less than 50 milliseconds; 99 percent in under 100 milliseconds. “I’ve tested many other platforms, and search speed like that is unheard of.”

Culture Kings sees four times better conversions when using Search
Since implementing Algolia, sessions using search have increased by 0.9 percent year-over-year, but importantly, those sessions are seeing four times better conversions. Average order value for the store has increased by 2.22 percent.
During Black Friday results were even more telling with revenue up 5.18 percent. Conversions increased by nearly 4x, search exits dropped 2.68 percent and time on the site after using search increased by 9 percent. E-commerce conversions during Black Friday and Christmas increased nearly 15 percent between 2021 and 2022.
Since implementing Algolia for Search, Culture Kings has adopted Algolia Recommend, moving from Nosto. Again, Jiang points out, Algolia wins out based on the speed of its Recommend offering. “We were constantly getting held back by Nosto, and even though recommendations were buried quite deep, you’d be surprised how many people would scroll down to them and just wait there,” Jiang says.

“And for some of our hyped products, we want recommendations to come higher, and that created a significant gap. Having Algolia be able to instantly show recommendations is a blessing.”
Importantly, Culture Kings has been able to customize the search experience through Algolia to fit its own culture and the needs of their unique e-commerce shop.
With Algolia Search in place, Jiang’s focus is around the coming launch of Culture Kings’ headless e-commerce platform, intended to improve overall performance to improve conversions and boost organic SEO rankings.

“And for some of our hyped products, we want recommendations to come higher, and that created a significant gap. Having Algolia be able to instantly show recommendations is a blessing.”
Importantly, Culture Kings has been able to customize the search experience through Algolia to fit its own culture and the needs of their unique e-commerce shop.
With Algolia Search in place, Jiang’s focus is around the coming launch of Culture Kings’ headless e-commerce platform, intended to improve overall performance to improve conversions and boost organic SEO rankings.