Enhanced recommendation performance and search functionality for the Sportisimo e-shop

About the project

Sportisimo is a leading Czech chain of sports equipment and clothing stores with more than 200 brick-and-mortar stores and strong online sales in five European countries. Its e-shop has annual sales of over CZK 2 billion and is one of the leaders in the Czech e-commerce market.

Main challenges

Sportisimo had long used its own recommendation and search systems, which over time failed to keep pace with customer expectations and market opportunities.

The solution became difficult to maintain and lacked the ability to respond effectively to user behavior in real time. The company therefore sought a tool that would not only deliver better business results, but also relieve the team of the burden of manually managing personalization components.

Solution

In 2024, Sportisimo conducted extensive A/B testing of three systems and platforms:

• internal solution

• Slovak Luigi's Box

• Czech tool Zoe.ai

By early 2025, only the last two platforms had reached the final phase. The test ran for two months in live operation and focused on two key areas: product recommendations and full-text search. The main metrics were conversion rate, engagement, average order value, and technical parameters such as response speed.

Zoe.ai outperformed competing systems by more than 2x on average in the area of recommendations – and by up to 4x on some recommendation surfaces –.

Zoe.ai's full-text search achieved results comparable to those of competing solutions. This confirmed to Sportisimo that the combination of Zoe Deep Recommendations & Search delivers high performance and much greater value when the costs of each platform are also included in the comparison.

Results?

Sportisimo decided to deploy Zoe.ai across all its markets and completely replace both its own systems and the original external solution.

Thanks to an intelligent machine learning model that learns from real customer behavior, there has been a significant increase in revenue from recommendation areas and overall user satisfaction. Another significant benefit was the reduction in manual system administration.

What next?

Sportisimo and Zoe.ai continue to collaborate on the development of new tools. Currently, Zoe Shopping Assistant is being tested—a smart conversational tool that helps customers choose the ideal product based on their preferences, interests, or favorite brands.