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Success Story

XEIBO

How XEBIO Built a Dynamic Discovery Engine with Appier AIQUA to Create Personalized Sports Shopping Experiences and Boost Add-to-Cart Rates by 3.3%

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 XEBIO strives to be a Sports Navigator for consumers, but its legacy single recommendation model struggled to deliver highly personalized product exposure and cross-selling on its e-commerce platform. By implementing Appier's AIQUA Recommendation Solution, the brand successfully deployed diverse scenario-based models while enjoying real-time performance analytics and dedicated local support in Japan. The results were remarkable: it not only resolved the pain point of insufficient long-tail product discovery but also achieved a 20% add-to-cart rate on product pages—a 3.3% uplift over the original system—successfully creating a customer shopping experience characterized by high conversion and engaging discovery. 

About XEBIO

Founded in 1962 and headquartered in Koriyama City, Fukushima Prefecture, XEBIO Holdings Co., Ltd. is a leading sports goods, equipment, and apparel retail group in Japan, operating multiple diverse retail brands across the country. XEBIO firmly believes in its brand vision: Enrich people's lives through sports. Positioning themselves as Sports Navigators and adhering to the principles of Customer First and Lifestyle Integration, they strive to be the bridge connecting people with active lifestyles. To this end, XEBIO envisions an online shopping experience where they don't just sell a pair of shoes, but rather tailor a highly interactive and exploratory shopping journey based on each consumer's unique background and interests (e.g., busy urban professionals, family shoppers, golfers, swimmers, or marathon runners).

  • Industry: Sport Retail
  • Company Size:
  • Location: Japan (Headquartered in Koriyama, Fukushima)
  • Goal: Drive add-to-cart and cross-sell growth by resolving discovery bottlenecks for low-interaction users through personalized experiences.

Products Used:

  • Appier AIQUA Recommendation solution 

Challenge: The Personalization Bottleneck of the Legacy System 

Before adopting Appier, XEBIO used a well-known recommendation solution in the market. However, as consumer demands diversified, the system's multiple limitations began to hinder XEBIO from achieving its business goals. Key challenges included:

  • Limited Model Variety: The system relied too heavily on user-based models, creating severe bias against low-traffic, low-exposure items and preventing consumers from discovering new products.
  • Deployment Rigidity: Once deployed, the marketing team lacked the flexibility to swap models in real-time or optimize strategies on the fly.
  • Poor Analytics Visibility: Without integrated performance and conversion tracking reports, the team struggled to measure immediate ROI.
  • Lack of Post-Sales Support: After system deployment, there was no dedicated technical or customer success team to assist with troubleshooting and operational optimization.

For a retailer with a high SKU count like XEBIO, over-reliance on a single user model created severe "Recommendation Silos." This led to three major business obstacles: Discovery Bottlenecks for new products, Conversion Stagnation caused by repeatedly recommending the same categories, and Associative Failure due to weak cross-product logic.


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Solution: Appier AIQUA's Multi-Model Architecture and Local Support 

To overcome these challenges and find the best answer, XEBIO decided to conduct a rigorous 28-day A/B test (January 21, 2025 – February 17, 2025), directly comparing the performance of Appier AIQUA recommendation models against competitors on the homepage and product pages.

Strategy 1: Agile Model Orchestration

Appier provided 6 core architectures and 28 scenario-based recommendation models (covering User-Based, Product-Based, Popularity, Advanced, Custom, and Autopilot). This gave XEBIO immense agility and the ability to orchestrate models on demand, freeing the team from past deployment rigidities.

  • User-Based Models: Continuously process individual customer signals—such as products viewed , items added to cart, and historical purchases — to push personalized product selections tailored to specific interests like running, golf, or swimming.
  • Product-Based Models: Focus on item-to-item associations by analyzing what other customers typically buy after viewing a specific item, ensuring recommendations remain relevant to the
    customer's current browsing focus

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Strategy 2: Multi-model Architecture to Break "Recommendation Silos"

To address the chronic pain point of low-exposure products failing to reach consumers, Appier helped XEBIO simultaneously deploy different strategic models on the website (especially product pages):

  • Product Discovery: Utilizing user-based models such as "Recommend for you" to push relevant content based on dynamically cross-referencing a visitor's active browsing with past behaviors to surface tailored sports gear, turning site navigation into a personalized product discovery engine. 
  • Boost Cross-selling: Utilizing product-based models such as "Related High-Converting Products," operating on the logic of "what other customers bought after viewing this item," to precisely stimulate cross-category sales.

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By combining User-Based and Product-Based architectures, Xebio overcomes traditional discovery bottlenecks. It ensures that customers see both highly relevant personal recommendations and high-converting, popular products, creating a richer, more engaging shopping journey that boosts conversion and add-to-cart rates. 

 

Strategy 3: Real-time Analytics and Enterprise-grade Local Support

Addressing the pain points of the legacy system, Appier introduced transparent, real-time performance tracking. More importantly, Appier provided a robust enterprise Customer Success Management (CSM) team locally in Japan. With strict SLA standards (first response within 1 hour, updates within 2 hours, solution provided within 8 hours), they became XEBIO's strongest operational backbone.

 

Result: Outstanding Conversion and Future Outlook

Following the rigorous 28-day A/B test (each model tested for 14 days in the top position), XEBIO witnessed the significant business impact delivered by the Appier solution:

  • Outstanding Add-to-Cart Conversion: Appier achieved an Add-to-cart Rate of 20% on product pages, outperforming the competitor model's 16.7% by a significant margin of 3.3 percentage points.
  • Building a Dynamic Discovery Engine: XEBIO successfully replaced its rigid legacy recommendation mechanism. Leveraging Appier's diverse architecture, which combines behavioral traits and popular trends, they enriched the personalized shopping experience.
  • Enhancing Customer Experience and Driving Growth: The innovative recommendation mechanism infused the shopping journey with the joy of discovery, directly driving higher conversions and revenue performance.

 

Appier outperforms the competitor with +3.3% add to cart rate

 By implementing the Appier AIQUA Recommendation Solution, XEBIO not only broke through technical recommendation bottlenecks but also fully realized its brand vision as a "Sports Navigator," delivering a tailor-made sports lifestyle to every digital customer.

 

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