Case Study: Co-op improves grocery search and grows basket sizes with Algolia

How Co-op leveraged relevant search results and smart product recommendations to scale fast

Co-op, the grocery retailer, needed a more robust and accurate search experience as its online shopping rapidly scaled during the pandemic. Its legacy search system couldn’t easily handle product tagging, merchandising rules, or real-time stock updates, so Co-op turned to Algolia to improve search, recommendations, and customer experience.

Algolia implemented Search for product discovery and search results, plus Algolia Recommend for out-of-stock alternatives, using a light-touch integration with live inventory data. The results were strong: basket additions increased by 7 percentage points, customers who saw alternatives had 6% higher basket spend, and conversion improved by 13% versus search alone. Co-op also credited Algolia’s Dynamic Re-ranking with saving merchandiser time and delivering more relevant results.

Co-op

Gareth Cottiss

eCommerce Development Manager