Case Study: Staples achieves 3.5–4.4% revenue-per-visit lift and 10x SKU scaling with Bloomreach Search

Staples goes new school more SKUs, better search, increased revenue

Staples, a global retailer with major e-commerce operations across 20 sites, faced a major challenge when it expanded its online catalog tenfold to about 2 million SKUs. Legacy, on‑premise search engines (six different versions) required intensive manual tuning, couldn’t scale to optimize the long tail of queries, and constrained product managers and talent as the company pushed into broader B2B offerings.

Staples implemented BloomReach Search, a self‑learning, behavior‑driven search and merchandising platform that automated relevance and personalization. The change cut manual tuning time by about 80% (team now spends one‑fifth the time), allowed the catalog to scale without adding staff, and produced measurable business gains—about a 4.4% RPV lift on Staples.com and 3.5% on the B2B site, translating to roughly $100M+ in incremental annual revenue—while freeing the team to focus on analytics, UX and product discovery.

Staples

Brian Higgins

Global Search Engine Product Manager