Shoe Carnival is one of America’s largest family footwear retailers. It boasts an exceptionally convenient shopping experience through its approximately 400 retail locations across 35 states and in Puerto Rico, on its mobile app, and online at www.shoecarnival.com. In 2021, the company purchased Southeastern US retailer Shoe Station, adding a new retail banner and bricks-and-mortar locations to its portfolio.

The company takes pride in creating a unique shopping experience, competitive pricing, and a wide selection of both brand and private label women's, men's, and children's shoes, boots, slippers, and athletic shoes. Shoe Carnival provides customers with daily promotions and new products dropping frequently — speed and agility are necessities to achieving its remarkable digital customer experience.

Like many retailers, online shopping picked up heavily between 2020 and 2021 with the spread of Covid-19. However, once the pandemic passed, the company had a new market reality to contend with: namely, smaller customer wallets.courtney 
“Our customers are grappling with inflation and recessionary times,” says Courtney Grisham, Director of E-commerce at Shoe Carnival. “We can’t control it. It’s a reality and we must shift priorities and our strategy, to always be listening and keeping in tune with what our customers are facing and how we can help.”

This shift in consumer behavior presented a need to be even more focused on promotions and deals, and an even greater focus on value.
 

Focus on content and search

To meet customer needs quickly, Shoe Carnival adopted a composable headless commerce approach built on Salesforce Composable Commerce Platform and MACH principles.

For content and search, the company implemented Amplience and Algolia, respectively. The solutions gave it the agility needed to react quickly, keeping up with the fast-moving retail landscape and its changing customer expectations — with less reliance on development teams.

"Algolia and Amplience are two of the biggest pieces of our composable ecosystem. They're key to the agility and speed in how we deploy content and manage the customer experience,” says  Courtney Grisham, Director of E-commerce at Shoe Carnival.
Content and search were the first priorities in its transformation due to their impact on customer experience and ultimately revenue.

“Search and the catalog are the heart of any commerce system, and they are very profitable for us. When people search and find the right products, they convert,” says Ned Moore, Director, eCommerce Product & Technology.
For a leading retailer like Shoe Carnival, a strong catalog and search capabilities are crucial to success. After all, customers are quick to move on if they can’t find what they want.

“Getting the right product in front of the right customer at the right time is our key to success,” Grisham says. “Algolia has done a lot to help us enable that, making sure that customers are finding what they're looking for.”

Reducing manual work

Unsurprisingly, Shoe Carnival has an impressively large number of SKUs to manage. Prior to its move to Algolia, this was a highly labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Of course, in retail, time is of the essence.

“We’re like any other retail organization, we’re lean from an organizational standpoint, and when you have the sheer number of SKUs that we have to manage across multiple categories and banners, it can be labor intensive to make sure we’re putting the right product in front of the right customer at the right time,” Grisham says. 

“That’s why more and more we’re leaning into the algorithms powered by Algolia to make sure that happens. That way, we can keep the manual site merchandising to a minimum.”

Algolia Search & Discovery, combined with the Amplience Commerce Experience Platform, provided the ease the shoe retailer needed. Members of the merchandising team can make changes quickly without any coding or developer involvement. New search rules, such as pinning specific products to result pages or adjusting how products are listed, can be done simply and easily by the merchandising team.

More than saving time and taking the load off the company’s developers, the new search platform is helping Shoe Carnival achieve its future-forward merchandising goals and be faster to market with game-changing improvements.

“Before, if we needed to make a last-minute change to the homepage, it would have been a big hassle, like unraveling a ball of twine. Now, it's as simple as a snap of the fingers. We can change things quickly and be nimble,” Grisham says.
Moore echoes his colleague: “We really wanted to address those areas of the user experience... it's great to jump into the platform and know that you don't have to do a full deployment on Salesforce.”

The nimbleness Algolia and Amplience bring allows the company to more easily optimize around seasonality and peak campaigns like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Back-to-School. Here, Grisham notes that Algolia Dynamic Re-ranking plays a vital role in boosting products and conversions.
 

Bringing colorful results

As a footwear fashion retailer, Shoe Carnival has unique merchandising needs that Algolia has been able to help with. 
In 2023, the company used Algolia to split its entire catalog out at the color level. Previously, all colors were rolled up to the style level, making it difficult to display colors on product listing pages. Due to how the company’s catalog is configured on the back end, breaking products down by color would’ve been impossible if not for Algolia.

“This was really important to us because, with shoes, it’s all about the color you want, and the pattern that you want,” Grisham says. Prior to using Algolia to split products out by color, customers would see small swatches on product listing pages, which she says they might miss if scrolling fast.

Again, Algolia’s ease and speed around making changes were assets. Grisham notes: “By utilizing Algolia to move that ability to the front end instead of having to go into the back end and the catalog—which would have been a technical headache—we were able to figure it out in a matter of a day, test it, and ‘boom’ it’s live.”

After the change, Shoe Carnival saw an immediate increase to overall site conversions.

Evolving together

Implementing Algolia’s search solution led to an immediate increase in conversion rates, a reduction in bounce rates, and higher engagement. It also helped Shoe Carnival operationally by allowing it to make game-changing improvements at scale as quickly as the fast-moving retail brand needs.

Productivity has doubled, as changes to content and search can be made in a fraction of the time, requiring far less manual work. Overnight feeds can be implemented with zero delay.

Algolia analytics are giving the company more granular control over its campaigns and helping them to make smarter data-driven decisions to improve customer experiences. Sorting rules can also be scheduled, to pin or boost products during dates for campaigns or sales. This use of automation results in fewer calendar notifications and far less manual work.

In September 2024, Shoe Carnival launched Shoe Station’s online presence and the company’s composable architecture has proven to be a further productivity benefit, notes Moore. “We launched Shoe Station on the same composable storefront as Shoe Carnival. Now we can deploy once and apply changes to both brands at the same time without doubling the work.”
Algolia and Amplience have become strategic partners for Shoe Carnival, and the company tests and adds new features, continuously improving business and exploring new possibilities. 

“It's been great for us to watch Algolia evolve, and we try to stay ahead of the curve. As soon as capabilities are available, we jump on them,” Grishamlsays. One of those capabilities is Algolia Recommend. “We saw an almost immediate increase in conversion from search when we enabled recommendations. It’s been a game-changer for us in getting the most value from search.”

With Algolia Recommend, both Average Order Value (AOV) and basket size have seen significant growth, he adds.
Grisham uses the example of add-on products, such as popular charms for Crocs, to illustrate the power of Recommend. “Using Algolia recommendations, we're now able to make sure that if somebody has the Crocs shoe in the cart, we can easily pin accessories or charms that go with the collection. That wasn't easy before.”

With an eye on how AI is affecting customer experience and how to leverage it to their advantage, the Shoe Carnival team has been working closely with Amplience’s AI Studio. “We’re really excited… It’s giving us a sneak peek at future tools that could have a big impact on the way we deliver content,” Moore says.

With all the benefits Shoe Carnival has seen from its relationship with Algolia, it’s hard to imagine going back, Grisham suggests. One of the highlights of Algolia to the Shoe Carnival team is its continuous investment into new features and capabilities that improve the search experience.

Moore adds: “I've worked with a lot of other search providers and built in-house search solutions, and I can say that I probably sleep better with Algolia than I did with any of the technologies we either purchased or built ourselves.”