Case Study: Better World Books reduces search complaints by 95% and boosts conversion rates with Algolia

Better World Books - Customer Case Study

Better World Books is a social‑enterprise e-commerce retailer (HQ in the USA and Scotland) that sells and ships books globally, maintaining a 20 million‑product index. As the company scaled from a campus startup to multi‑warehouse operations, their incumbent search could not keep up — poor discoverability, slow results, hard product limits, and out‑of‑sync inventory/price data generated frequent customer complaints and a suboptimal shopping experience.

Working with Algolia, Better World Books deployed a live proof‑of‑concept across the full 20M index in days and migrated both betterworldbooks.com and betterworldbooks.co.uk to Algolia Instant Search with real‑time indexing and a scalable infrastructure. The result: search complaints fell 95%, conversion rose across desktop (+10.25%), tablet (+8.27%) and mobile (+6.64%), and customers now enjoy a faster, more accurate, and more intuitive shopping experience.

Better World Books

Matt Byers

Sr. Director of Technology