How RC Willey Increased Add-to-Cart Rate by 13.1% with Marqo

Company Overview

RC Willey is one of the most established home furnishings retailers in the Western United States, serving customers across furniture, major appliances, mattresses, electronics, flooring, and home essentials. With a major omnichannel retail business and a broad ecommerce catalog spanning highly considered purchases, customers navigate significant variation in brands, styles, dimensions, features, price points, and availability. Finding the right product can involve everything from a specific appliance model to a broader search for furniture that fits a particular room, style, or need. For RC Willey, intuitive ecommerce search and product discovery are essential to helping customers navigate complex purchase decisions and convert intent across its extensive home assortment.

Why RC Willey Evaluated Marqo

Across furniture, appliances, mattresses, electronics, and flooring, RC Willey faced a discovery challenge that grows harder as catalog complexity grows. Shoppers expressed the same need through many combinations of room, dimension, finish, feature, and brand, mixing practical constraints with aesthetic intent.

RC Willey needed product discovery that could interpret layered requirements across categories with fundamentally different attribute structures, return results aligned to real product specifications rather than keyword overlap, and support high-consideration research that often concludes in a showroom.

Challenges

Home furnishings retailers face a cross-category discovery problem, where one catalog spans furniture, appliances, and electronics with fundamentally different attribute structures. Descriptive queries did not always align with the way products were catalogued, and maintaining relevance across such different attribute sets required ongoing merchandising work and manual rule management. That overhead slowed the pace at which new inventory and seasonal assortments could be optimized, and constrained RC Willey's ability to convert high-consideration research traffic, both for customers completing purchases online and for those preparing for a showroom visit.

Solution

Marqo's pixel was installed to capture shopper interaction signals, including search queries, clicks, add-to-cart events, purchases, and broader browsing behavior. This data enabled Marqo to understand how customers searched for and evaluated products across RC Willey's catalog, including patterns tied to room, dimension, finish, and brand across very different categories.

Marqo ingested these signals alongside RC Willey's catalog data to train a model tailored to its product taxonomy and merchandising language. As assortments rotated and new inventory arrived, Marqo continuously updated rankings based on real onsite engagement, reducing the need for ongoing manual rule tuning and category-by-category merchandising maintenance.

RC Willey deployed Marqo through a controlled production A/B test and reported statistically significant improvements in shopper engagement across its discovery experience.

Cross-category intent understanding: RC Willey reported improved interpretation of descriptive queries across categories with very different attribute structures.
Specification-aware relevance: Stronger alignment between results and product specifications such as dimensions, capacity, finish, and configuration.
Adaptive ranking & personalization: Product rankings continuously adjusted using real-time behavioral signals, while preserving merchandising control and transparency.
Reduced operational overhead: Reduced reliance on category-by-category rule management as rankings improved through learning from anonymized onsite behavior.

Results

RC Willey evaluated Marqo through a controlled production A/B test running over three weeks across its discovery experience, measured at the user level across approximately 121,000 users per arm.

Overall Business Impact

+13.1%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate

+12.7%

Increase in Conversion Rate

What This Means

Understanding descriptive intent across categories with very different attribute structures made a large, technically detailed catalog navigable for shoppers researching high-consideration purchases.

Moving Forward

RC Willey runs Marqo across its discovery experience, supporting shoppers researching high-consideration purchases online and in preparation for store visits.

Results reflect RC Willey's experience during the measured period and may vary based on implementation, seasonality, traffic composition, and other business factors. Reported outcomes are RC Willey's measurements and do not constitute a guarantee of future performance. Metrics were collected using RC Willey's onsite tracking and Marqo's analytics framework. Marqo processes only anonymized behavioral signals and does not collect personally identifiable information. Marqo™ is a trademark of Marqo Inc. RC Willey is a registered trademark of RC Willey Home Furnishings. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.