The Brand

Running for over 60 years, Topps Tiles set out on a mission to provide the very best in tiling and are now the UK’s number one tiling specialist. 

Topps Tiles prides themselves on providing an inspirational shopping experience with unrivaled customer service, coupled with innovative product ranges and exceptional convenience. With over 300 stores in the UK, Topps Tiles needed to ensure their ecommerce site also delivers the same level of customer service that shoppers are receiving in store.  

The Challenge

Topps Tiles launched a new headless website alongside their digital agency Tom&Co with the mission of providing a seamless omnichannel customer experience. With a vast product catalogue, Topps Tiles considered search to be essential to their online customer journey. With two different websites, one B2C for retail and one B2B for trade, Topps Tiles were looking for a product discovery tool that could work for both the B2B and B2C websites with vastly different customer types. 

The B2C website is used not only by shoppers at home but also by instore colleagues helping customers to find suitable products or alternatives to items in the store. 

It was imperative that shoppers are presented with the most relevant results when searching, whether they are an in-store associate helping a customer, a tradesperson ordering for their business, or a home consumer redesigning their bathroom. 

Topps Tiles’ key considerations for a search and discovery tool: 

• A solution which could be optimised for mobile given that most of the retail website traffic comes through mobile. 
• Baked in machine learning to save the team manual time and effort. 
• Speed was of high importance, quick loading and quick results. 
• An easily manageable solution – the ecommerce team are responsible for setting up redirects and creating synonyms and needed an intuitive portal for this. 
• A discovery platform that was innovative and had a roadmap for the future.

The Solution

After being recommended Athos Commerce by their web development agency Tom&Co and hearing great reviews elsewhere, Topps Tiles investigated further into Athos and its capabilities. 

Athos also has a lot of existing homeware B2B and B2C clients similar to Topps Tiles and could provide an all in one discovery solution including merchandising and recommendations, something Topps Tiles were looking at implementing in the future.   

Topps Tiles have been live with Athos Smart Search since 2022. The initial launch was on their B2C site but after seeing the success, this has now been rolled out onto their B2B trade site resulting in 41% uplift of customers using search. Searching is actively encouraged on the Topps Tiles site, with a centralized prominent search box. When a customer engages with search, the overlay shows related terms, suggests content from their advice page and displays images of relevant products. 

Tiles being a considered purchase, having content feed into search was also of great importance. For Topps Tiles, search isn’t just about converting a customer right away, it’s about inspiring them, informing them, and helping them within that journey, even if they wind up purchasing in store. 

Topps Tiles has also been tracking the ‘0 results found’ pages through Athos to identify search trends which are returning no results. Customers browse quite differently on site, especially considering store colleagues also use the site search.  

The Results

Someone might be browsing quite generally, searching for ‘kitchen tiles’ whereas other customers or colleagues might be looking for something more specific such as ‘pink square bathroom wall tile’ or searching by SKU, therefore it’s super important that search can produce relevant results for many query types. 

An example of this is the term ‘Moroccan’. Topps Tiles saw people searching for this term which was initially returning no results. They were able to feed this back to their buying team for insight. 

• 49% uplift in searches on our retail website 
• 41% uplift in searches on our trade website 
• 23% increase in revenue 

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.