About the partners

VioVet is an online pet supplies retailer, offering a range of food, toys, and prescription medication.

Increasingly is a tech partner whose AI-powered solutions enable retailers to grow their average order value (AOV) by helping their shoppers find relevant products.

Their success story recently featured on our Awin-Win Marketing Podcast. Listen to the full story or scroll down for the highlights.

The challenge

VioVet wanted a product bundling tool for its website. Years of data confirmed that its customers routinely bought large quantities of single items like pet food alongside purchases of toys, clothes, and accessories.

Product recommendations would help VioVet grow AOV while enhancing its customer experience, but a bottleneck in development capacity led to the feature request being shelved.

Managing an extensive product catalogue with over 80,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) left little room for new, untested additions. While theoretically beneficial, features like product bundling were not prioritized due to the speculative aspect of getting results.

With an in-house build looking unfeasible, VioVet turned to Increasingly and affiliate technology partners to put its plans in motion.

The solution

“When we found a couple of tech providers through Awin, that promised to bring some of those solutions on-site for us. Worst case, we saw that as a way to test the solution, see the impact, and build a business case around why it was a priority for the business. Best case, we just plug in a partner and let them run on-site indefinitely.”

Increasingly believes customers don’t head to a site to buy single products – they head there to complete a successful journey. In fashion that might mean completing a look, in the beauty sector it could be finding everything they need for their personal beauty regime. In the pet world, customers are often looking to find everything they might want for their loyal companions. It all amounts to pressure on retailers like VioVet to maximize the value of every session.

Unfortunately, product bundling technologies require significant amounts of time and resource when built in-house. That’s why the ability to launch technology partners like Increasingly via an affiliate program has proved so popular.

An enterprise-grade solution combining fast and convenient UX with AI models that listen to customers to recommend the most relevant products based on their interests and behavior, Increasingly checked all the boxes for VioVet, plus three extras:

• Rapid integration: Thanks to its integration with the Awin MasterTag (the same technology used by VioVet to track its affiliate program), Increasingly launched with zero development work.

• Flexible placement: Increasingly worked with VioVet to find convenient and accessible places to show recommendations while enabling the retailer to stick to its commercial agreements with suppliers.

• Native design: Despite being a third-party solution, Increasingly designed its technology to fit seamlessly with the rest of VioVet’s e-commerce site.

• Risk-free commercials: Increasingly, like most affiliate tech providers, operated on a cost-per-acquisition model (CPA), with no upfront fees, meaning VioVet paid only on results.

Time, then, to build the engine. Approximately 80% of VioVet’s recommendations were made by Increasingly’s algorithm, which continuously learns from user interactions and purchases to display the most relevant results.

AI is crucial here, as some purchase patterns are as unusual as they are undetectable. For instance, the natural assumption would be that someone buying a 15kg bag of dog food would not also purchase a 2kg bag of the same product. They did. And it was these statistically significant findings that led to Increasingly becoming more effective over time.

For the blind spots and a contextual view, VioVet used its experience to apply manually injected rules. These tweaks helped to promote seasonal products over Christmas and recommend products similar to out-of-stock items. 

The custom rules also enabled VioVet to exclude certain lines from being recommended, like pharmaceutical products which have sensitive rules around promotion.

In all, VioVet managed to achieve the necessary level of customization to make Increasingly part of its product and, in turn, an enhancement to its customer journey.

The results

“We needed a product bundling tool to help us grow AOV but lacked the resources to build it. We launched tech partner Increasingly via Awin and created a customized recommendation engine that added an extra 1.2 products per order. It’s realized revenue opportunities on our site that we could not have achieved ourselves in the same time scale.”

Increasingly has delivered many things to VioVet. Starting with the results, customers who interact with Increasingly average an additional 1.2 products per basket, leading to an AOV increase of 7.4%.

On top of incremental impact, the technology has also delivered clear internal value, removing a long overdue request from the development team and handing VioVet’s directors a cost-effective way of bringing financially beneficial features to the site.

VioVet has since moved Increasingly onto a fixed-fee model for added certainty on both sides of the partnership, all while continuing to track and manage everything via its affiliate program.

VioVet always had the ideas. Through affiliate tech providers, it now has a way of realizing them.

Launch product bundling with Increasingly