Decathlon Reduces Search Exit Rate by 20% with Marqo’s AI-powered Search
Company Overview
A retailer that’s one of the world’s largest sporting goods retailers, operating over 1,700 stores and digital storefronts across more than 70 countries. The company offers an extensive catalog of over 100,000 SKUs across 85+ sports categories — from running and cycling to archery and scuba diving.
As a brand focused on innovation, this retailer’s digital channels have become essential touchpoints for product discovery and customer engagement. Their eCommerce sites handle millions of monthly visits globally, with on-site search playing a pivotal role in guiding customers to the right product quickly and efficiently.
Challenge
With such a broad and highly specialized product catalog, this retailer’s legacy keyword-based search struggled to meet evolving customer expectations. Specific challenges included:
Inability to handle descriptive or multi-attribute queries
waterproof trail running shoes size 42High rates of zero-result or irrelevant results, leading to increased search abandonment
Limited capacity to suggest visually or functionally similar alternatives when an item was unavailable
Difficulty understanding non-standard, hobbyist, or sport-specific terminology across multiple languages and regions
This led to elevated search exit rates — with a significant number of customers leaving the site after failed or frustrating search experiences.
Solution
In 2023, this retalier partnered with Marqo, an AI-native vector search platform built for multi-category product discovery. Within a few weeks:
Marqo replaced the retailer’s traditional keyword search engine across several regional eCommerce sites
AI-powered semantic search enabled better understanding of long, descriptive, or typo-prone queries
Vector-based similarity search allowed for dynamic product suggestions when exact matches weren’t available
Multilingual search capabilities were enhanced by Marqo’s context-aware embeddings, improving relevance across non-English markets
Results
Following a 6-week A/B test across key eCommerce regions, this retailer achieved significant improvements in customer engagement and conversion-driving metrics:
20% reduction in search exit rate
Keeping more customers engaged within the shopping journey
Increased add-to-cart rates for multi-attribute and long-tail queries
Higher search relevance and consistency across multilingual sites
Improving international customer satisfaction
Faster and more intuitive search experiences on both mobile and desktop platforms
What This Means
For a global, multi-category retailer like this retailer — where product variety and specificity are core to the brand experience — delivering highly relevant, flexible, and efficient search results is mission-critical.
With Marqo, this retaler:
Minimized customer frustration by reducing zero-result and irrelevant search experiences
Retained more shoppers within their purchase funnel, directly impacting conversion and average order size
Enabled context-aware, multilingual search experiences across a highly regionalized retail network
Future-proofed their digital discovery experience for new product categories, languages, and customer behaviors — all with a fast, scalable implementation.
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