The Brand

Selling extremely varied items from biscuits, to trampolines, to electric bikes, Minimani have a vast product catalogue containing tens of thousands of SKU’s and are continuing to increase their product offerings through 2024.

The Challenge

Minimani needed a product discovery solution that allowed their customers to navigate thousands of products efficiently and to save their ecommerce team manual work. 

The Solution

Knowing they required an AI based intelligent product discovery suite, Minimani evaluated alternative solutions but were impressed by what Athos had to offer finding that the platform was more intuitive than others on the market. 

Tuomo Simonjoki, Director of Ecommerce at Minimani had prior experience using Athos and witnessing its evolution over time, installed confidence in its ongoing development. Minimani trusted that Athos would maintain its innovation, remain at the forefront of advancements, and consistently devise new, intelligent approaches to product discovery. 

Minimani’s digital agency Pinja also had experience and knowledge of the Athos platform so were able to support this decision and guide Minimani through the implementation process.

Implementation and Use of Athos 

Searching is actively encouraged on the Minimani site, with a centralized prominent search box with pre-filled text. When a customer engages with search, the overlay shows related terms and suggestions along with displaying images of relevant products. 

Just like with the adoption of any new technology, it’s crucial for staff to acquire knowledge and undergo training for new procedures. The Minimani team dedicated efforts to business change initiatives, ensuring they were adequately trained and equipped to utilize Athos to its fullest potential. 

Due to the manual effort required by the team before installing Athos for merchandising, the Minimani team first found themselves still naturally doing a lot of manual work. However now they only manually pin certain products, leaving the rest to be handled by Athos’ AI which in turn frees up time for the ecommerce team. 

Minimani utilizes Athos reports to analyze their customers’ search queries. 

If they observe a significant number of searches for a particular product that they currently don’t stock, this data is relayed to the purchasing team for
potential inclusion in future product catalogue expansions. They also use this data to check for correlations between search figures and sales of that particular product. In cases where there is a disparity between a high volume of customer searches for a specific product and low sales, the team investigates the customer journey to identify reasons for non-purchase. This could include factors such as pricing issues or insufficient information on the product detail page, allowing them to make necessary adjustments to boost sales.   

Feature Focus:

Product Recommendations: Minimani uses product recommendations as carousels on the front page, at the beginning of the categories. They are also adding them elsewhere, including to the shopping cart in the near future. Product recommendations help bring the most popular products from a large product selection to the shopper’s attention right away. At the same time, certain categories can be highlighted on the front page so that the best products in the category are presented. For example, on the front page, the top products of the garden category might be featured in the spring. 

Since Minimani is also able to monitor how product recommendations work from the data, they can see what people are interested in and change product recommendations to achieve optimized results. 

The Results

Minimani are continuing to expand their product catalogue and are continuing to work closely with digital agency, Pinja, to enrich product information using artificial intelligence, aiming to enable a short go-to-market time also for Minimani’s products. Minimani are also ensuring they are continuing to use Athos to its maximum potential through regular assessments with their customer success manager and attending monthly Athos’ Product Townhall. 

• 37% increase in conversion rate since going live with Athos
• 23% of site visits are using search
• 6% monthly increase in views per user

Partner with Athos Commerce to transform your ecommerce store. With proven tools and expertise in search and merchandising, we empower businesses to achieve measurable growth. Contact us today to start optimizing your store for success.