How ‘Nordic Wholefoods’ Ruohonjuuri reduced first-time visitors cart abandonment rate by 17.31% with real-time product discovery experiences

The Ruohonjuuri story

The story of Ruohonjuuri began with a small wooden shack located on the site of the Forum in the center of Helsinki where a group of young idealistic volunteers started the company for importing and selling recycled paper.

Many things have gone from marginal to normal during Ruohonjuuri’s long history – recycled paper and organic food were strange things in the early 1980s – but today they are quite commonplace.

Humanity, human experience and genuine, personal customer service have been important to Ruohonjuuri since the beginning and they will be so in the future as well.

Today, Ruohonjuuri offers shoppers a diverse range of high quality, environmentally responsible, organic, and fair-trade products, from grocery to cosmetics.

Before

To better serve customers in areas of Finland and Europe with no access to brick-and-mortar locations, or those simply shopping from home, Ruohonjuuri was in search of an product discovery solution (and had tried out a couple).

The goal: to help new shoppers more effectively discover a product of interest in a large product catalog with over 9,000 different products, while adapting to existing customers’ varying  buying needs.

Collaborating with Europe’s top Shopify Plus agency, Woolman, the ecommerce team envisioned product recommendations that could adjust to a buyer’s onsite behavior in real time, leverage past purchases, one-click add-to-cart, show reviews, and dynamically adapt to sale prices.

After

Obviyo Recommend was selected because of its ease of use, rich functionality, and because it is powered by the same personalization algorithms used by Amazon, a parent company of the Whole Foods in US.

Gradually, a wide range of Growth Bots, a ready-to-go intelligent content blocks designed to perform specific real-time product discovery strategies were deployed right across the entire buyer journey – from Home page to Confirmation page. Returning visitors and buyers are offered a different engagement experience compared to new visitors.

An increase in results across all Growth Bots was almost immediate. Leading indicators that the app was driving results in the right direction were the average order value of new visitors that increased by +13.74% while cart abandonment rate decreased -17.31% – proof that product recommendations were very relevant and profitable.

Results

Time period: 30 days