Inside Columbia's 34% Customer Conversion Improvement

September 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

Shifting from manual to automated product recommendations drives a 67% increase in recommended sales, lifting conversion along the way.

With six retail stores, 50 outlets, a massive retail distribution network, and powerhouse brands such as Sorel, Mountain Hardwear, and up-and-coming Montrail, Columbia Sportswear has established firm footing at the top of the outdoor apparel market. While the iconic multichannel brand has been around for 70 years, it wasn’t until August 2009 that the company began investing considerably in e-commerce. Since that time, Columbia has built e-commerce sites for all four of its major brands, including a portfolio of 22 international sites for Columbia and Sorel.

Thaddeus Kaczmarek, director of e-commerce at Columbia Sportswear, says the e-commerce initiative at Columbia grew quickly, on par with the explosion of overall e-commerce sales taking place in the latter part of the past decade. When it determined e-commerce would be a key element of its growth strategy, Columbia began experimenting with on-site product recommendations. The early effort required ongoing manual analysis of sales trends and further manual intervention to implement recommendations. This labor-intensive approach was not conducive to international site expansion, and it resulted in broad and somewhat generic recommendations. As the rest of the online retail world moved quickly toward ultrapersonalized site experiences, including customer-specific product recommendations, Kaczmarek knew an upgrade was in order.