PELAGIC’s Journey to Increased Sales & Engagement through Nosto’s CX Optimization Services

About PELAGIC

Founded in 2002 off the coast of Newport Beach, California, PELAGIC has deep roots in the world of fishing and ocean culture. It was born out of a profound love for the offshore lifestyle and a recognized need for a brand that could resonate with professional captains, mates, deckhands, and watermen.

Challenge

PELAGIC originally specialized in high-quality apparel for deep-sea fishing enthusiasts, catering to those who faced prolonged sun exposure during offshore fishing tournaments. While this core market has remained pivotal, the brand has expanded over the years into various sun protection verticals.

As their business has steadily grown, PELAGIC has aimed to continue to enhance customer engagement, improve site navigation, and optimize the onsite shopping journey. Given that nearly 80% of their traffic comes from mobile devices, they’ve sought ways to boost metrics such as average order value (AOV), time spent on site (or page views), conversion rate and overall customer engagement across all devices.

Solution

As PELAGIC transitioned to Shopify and expanded their tech stack, they sought a solution that would power efficiency and offer enterprise-level capabilities. Their choice to partner with Nosto was driven by a need to harness its AI and machine learning-powered product recommendations. This not only made it effortless to showcase items aligned with shoppers’ behavior, but also highlight products commonly purchased together, as well as those tailored to a shopper’s preferences.

After the success of their initial years with Nosto, PELAGIC deepened their partnership by engaging Nosto’s Managed Services team. This shift allowed them to focus more on optimizing the customer experience (CX) through data-driven insights and metrics. They kicked off their CX optimization package by working with the Nosto team to transition from stacked carousels to mobile grid layouts for recommendations, resulting in a significant boost in customer engagement. “If people get to the bottom of the mobile page, we want to easily show relevant options to continue shopping,” said Eugene Lai, Sr. Director of Ecom & Digital.

PELAGIC also decided to incorporate dynamic bundles, mini-cart recommendations, and out-of-stock recommendations based on findings and suggestions from the Nosto team.

Dynamic Bundles: these allowed PELAGIC to showcase specific product sets on the product detail pages (PDPs), streamlining the merchandising process while saving time and driving more value from Nosto. They also implemented a checkbox feature within the recommendation template, allowing the spending total to update in real-time as a user selects or deselects items within the bundle—facilitating the addition of multiple items to the cart with a single click.

Out-of-Stock Recommendations: these proved impactful in terms of performance data but also significantly saved time for PELAGIC. According to Taylor Tate, Ecommerce Web Merchandiser, she used to spend hours manually checking inventory levels, updating collections, and pages. Now, if a user clicks on a sold-out size, an out-of-stock recommendation suggests other options in the same size. Tate notes, “The logic is powerful, and we can trust it. We don’t need to constantly check that it’s working.”

Mini-cart Recommendations: this introduced an extra chance for upselling, providing relevant product suggestions based on items in a shopper’s cart. This experience integrates seamlessly without steering shoppers away from their intended path to purchase, maintaining an uninterrupted shopping journey. To refine the mini-cart recommendations for optimal performance, PELAGIC conducted A/B tests to identify product types that would drive the highest AOV and conversion rates.

Dynamic bundles were unexpected. We never realized how powerful this could be.

Eugene Lai, Senior Director of Ecommerce & Digital

Results

Since focusing on CX optimization alongside Nosto’s Managed Services team and honing in on specific strategies, performance and sales have increased 6.71% for PELAGIC, AOV has improved by over 8%, and page views have jumped to over 20% over the past year. Outside of the numbers, PELAGIC feels confident in their onsite customer experience now more than ever. “Our customer journey has become more fluid with fewer hurdles. It’s the greatest contribution to our site.”

As for the future, PELAGIC is excited to continue driving additional value to their site and have found a valuable partnership with the Nosto team, most notably Nosto’s Director of Conversion Rate Optimization [CRO] whom they have been working with. “According to Lai, “Julia [CRO Director] has been a game-changer for us. She is an integral part of our user experience and is really leading the discussion by bringing fresh ideas, insightful data, and in-depth analysis to the table every week.” He went on to say, “Your team listens and takes feedback. Nosto is not just a technology company – it’s a technology and service.”

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