We help e-shops with personalised search, product recommendations and category listings – an interview with Luigi's Box

They help Alza, Notino, Škoda and 3,000 other small and medium-sized e-shops. Could they help yours too? Read our interview with the CEO of Luigi's Box, Gejza Nagy, and find out exactly what Luigi's Box can help with, how much orders can grow after deploying their tool, and other interesting facts about their services.

1. Why did you decide to found Luigi's Box? What were the beginnings like?

Before Luigi's Box we were building websites and web applications. In 2014 we teamed up with Tomáš Kramár and Michal Barla to show the world – at that time mainly Slovakia – that search is an important part of a website, and that when search does not work properly it can seriously and negatively affect customer satisfaction as well as an e-shop's revenue. We worked on Luigi's Box alongside the agency and other projects “whenever there was time”, right up until 2016, when we raised our first seed investment and officially founded the company.

The start was hard, because we had to evangelise the market. In those days search was seen as just a technical part of a website; e-shops had it because everyone had it, a developer put it together “just so it was there” and could tick it off his to-do list. Our goal was to show e-commerce managers and e-shop owners the weak spots in their search and then give them the chance to fix those mistakes in a few clicks. Thanks to our previous experience from the web agencies we had built, we knew that the bottleneck when implementing new solutions is often an understaffed IT department. That is why we built Luigi's Box from day one so that it could be implemented with a single line of JavaScript, without having to involve IT at all. Many clients implemented us through Google Tag Manager and their IT department did not even have to know about it.

Today, 8 years after officially founding the company, we are the best-rated search and product recommendation tool in the world.

2. How many people work at Luigi's Box?

Right now, in June 2024, the Luigi's Box team has over 90 people in several countries (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Spain, England, …). Since the beginning of 2024 the team has grown from roughly 70 to the current 90-plus people.

3. What exactly can Luigi's Box help an e-shop with?

Luigi's Box helps e-shops with personalised search, product recommendations and category listings, which increases the conversion rate and the average order value. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the relevance of results and provides valuable insights into search performance.

Integration is possible in several ways, requires no IT help or knowledge, and you only pay for the services you use. Overall, Luigi's Box helps increase revenue and improve the customer experience.

4. Is Luigi's Box suitable for everyone, including someone who is just starting an e-shop? If not, what would you recommend to beginners in this area?

Luigi's Box suits e-shops of various sizes, partly thanks to its varied pricing. For deploying Luigi's Box search to make sense, an e-shop should have at least hundreds of products and at least 50,000 page views a month. In general we recommend deploying Luigi's Box to every e-shop, small or large. For e-shops with fewer searches, the personalised product recommendations and category listings from Luigi's Box can be exactly what brings the benefit. Small and medium-sized e-shops, or their agencies, can also use the self-service integration and deploy and launch Luigi's Box on the e-shop themselves. For larger e-shops we can do an advanced integration, a connection over API and so on.

Of course, the e-shop needs at least some traffic, and ideally the search field should be clearly visible – so that visitors actually use it.

5. What negative effects can poor or non-functioning search have on an e-shop?

Poor or non-functioning search on an e-shop can significantly harm the business. It can reduce the conversion rate, because customers do not find what they are looking for and leave without buying. That also leads to lower customer satisfaction, which reduces loyalty and repeat purchases. By losing potential sales the e-shop loses revenue, and on top of that its reputation can suffer if dissatisfied customers share their negative experience. Customer support costs can rise at the same time, because frustrated customers seek help more often. All in all, ineffective search can have a significant impact on every aspect of the business.

There is one important thing to keep in mind: a visitor who searches knows what they want and is far closer to buying than one who is just browsing.

On average we see a conversion rate several times higher among visitors who use search. But when they do not find what they are looking for, they leave for a competitor, where they probably will find it – and buy it.

6. On average, how much do orders or revenue rise at e-shops that started using Luigi's Box? Give some concrete examples.

The benefit of Luigi's Box can be measured through ordinary Google Analytics or through our own analytics. After deploying Luigi's Box the client sees key metrics – search usage, conversion from search, growth in average order value and so on.

At the e-shop Electronic-star.sk, for example, Luigi's Box increased revenue by 100,000 € a year, at Kosik.cz we see a 10% rise in conversions from search, and at 11teamsports we saw a 38% increase in the average order value from search. We regularly write case studies about this, which you can find on our website. The end result is a satisfied user, because they found what they needed on the e-shop. And a satisfied e-shop too, because Luigi's Box helped increase the number of orders and their value.

7. I get the feeling that many people underestimate the effectiveness of search, or do not attach much importance to it. How do you manage to convince them?

Many people do underestimate the effectiveness of search on an e-shop, but concrete statistics and case studies show that effective search increases the conversion rate and the average order value. A positive search experience leads to higher satisfaction and repeat purchases. An investment in quality search pays for itself quickly through increased sales and customer loyalty. Personalised or visual search meets individual customer needs better, and analytics tools provide valuable data about their behaviour, which helps continuously improve the offering. Luigi's Box helps achieve these benefits by providing advanced search and personalised product recommendations using artificial intelligence and machine learning, thereby increasing revenue and improving the customer experience.

8. What do Luigi's Box clients appreciate most, in your view or according to their feedback?

Feedback from our clients reaches us from several sources – from everyday communication, quarterly meetings, and also through reviews our clients leave on G2, Gartner and other portals. Most often they value the excellent functionality of Luigi's Box search, the advanced analytics, the relevant product recommendations for their customers and the great support on our side.

9. Who does Luigi's Box work with? Can Luigi's Box deliver a ready-made solution through some of these partnerships that saves the client money or time?

Luigi's Box works with several types of partners – various e-shop platforms such as Shoptet or Shopsys, technology partners (SmartEmailing, for example) and partner agencies. Yes, depending on the client's size, expectations and options we can recommend a partner able to handle those requirements and deliver a ready-made solution that brings in orders and profit.

10. What sets Luigi's Box apart from the competition?

AI, easy deployment and convenient use. Luigi's Box stands out with its self-service integration, which is simple and requires no programming knowledge. Our customers also rate our support very positively, which we are extremely grateful for. Luigi's Box supports several languages, including all languages written in the Latin alphabet, which makes selling effectively possible anywhere. It is a comprehensive product discovery platform that, besides search, also includes product recommendations, page customisation and comprehensive analytics.

11. Which well-known e-shops and companies does Luigi's Box work with?

Among the better-known clients, Luigi's Box is used by Alza, Nay, 11teamsports, Astratex, Notino, Nespresso, Acer, Under Armour, Škoda, KiK, O2 and Tatra banka, for example.

Besides the big and well-known e-shops, Luigi's Box is used by a little over 3,000 small and medium-sized e-shops.

12. What can your existing and new customers look forward to in the near future?

Many of our existing clients want to influence the weights of the signals used to rank search results. We are now offering them that option. Along with it we are launching our own A/B testing tool, so that they can test these changes and find out what real impact they have on their business performance.

We are also trying to make managing search and recommendations easier for our clients. They can now assign specific products to specific recommendation positions, fine-tuning the recommendation process exactly as they want it. We are also introducing better management of several e-shops within a shared configuration. That will be appreciated above all by clients running several e-shops, especially those operating in several countries. We are also preparing a significant improvement to synonyms, which directly affect search quality. In the near future we would also like to improve the autocomplete, which suggests products or categories as the user types their query.

For new clients we are working to simplify and speed up the integration process for our solution – and therefore make it cheaper too. We are preparing support for new e-shop platforms. We are improving support for existing platforms, for example Magento. We are also preparing a self-service solution for Luigi's Box Recommender, which is interesting above all for smaller and medium-sized clients. They will be able to do the integration exactly as they want and will have the integration process more under control. At the same time we are investing in innovations such as semantic search, Large Language Models (LLM) and other applications of artificial intelligence in our internal processes, as well as in new features for clients and end customers.