Yofi's bot prevention platform helped STASHED prioritize customers and improve CX.

STASHED SF – Acquiring Customers and Increasing Customer Lifetime Value Through Bot Detection and Prevention 

‍STASHED is a staple of the San Francisco sneaker and streetwear world by providing its customers with the latest and greatest brands, including exclusive sneakers. STASHED has been designed to offer an unmatched retail experience focused on cultural history, impeccable curation, and world-class customer service to a loyal and trendsetting customer base. Building and growing a strong community with their customers has always been at the heart of STASHED’s mission.

Challenge:

Unfortunately, within the last couple of years, knowing and prioritizing your customers has become more challenging with the rise of bots. These bots have been released, generated thousands of fake profiles that inflate software expenses, and, most importantly, impacted the meaningful relationship that STASHED has created within its community. The STASHED team worked tirelessly to ensure their customers had the best opportunity to get their desired products.‍

• ‍Raffles & Releases: STASHED would go through and manually review hundreds of thousands of entries to remove bots from their raffles to increase the likelihood of their true customer winning raffles. Enhancing their raffles, STASHED created new websites, required user engagement with social media, and implemented dozens of creative alternatives to prevent bots.
• ‍Fake Profiles & Marketing Impact: These bots were creating hundreds of thousands of profiles that rapidly increased their email service provider costs and skewed their marketing analytics. STASHED spent hours manually removing these fake accounts to ensure they could continue creating customer segments to reward their loyal customers.
• ‍Operations & Manual Reviewing: STASHED received an exponential jump in suspicious orders, customer support tickets, and returns from botters and resellers. Focused on providing the best customer service, STASHED spent hours handling and reviewing suspicious activity to get the product into the hands of its customers.

"As the hype for sneakers increases, so does our challenge to meet the demand.As a consumer-first retailer, we've focused our efforts to ensure that customer prioritization and personalization is top of mind." - Manne Gonzalez, General Manager

The STASHED team spent hours combatting bots to prioritize their customers, especially raffles and releases, which only amounted to a small number of sales while taking hours of work. The amount of time invested in stopping bots became unprofitable; thus, STASHED turned to Yofi to help them continue to prioritize their community and fight against bots.

‍Solution:

Yofi provided STASHED a platform to prevent bots and bad actors, improve the customer experience by prioritizing new and existing customers, and ensure a clean data set. Specifically, STASHED leveraged Yofi to reduce manual bot cleanup, acquire new customers, and increase the lifetime value of existing ones.

• ‍Significantly Reduce Time Spent: STASHED prides itself on providing the best experience for their customers, which Yofi enhanced by reducing 20 hours a week of work from manually reviewing orders, raffles, and suspicious behavior. Instead of spending time analyzing whether someone is a bot, Yofi provided real-time flagging of suspicious users and raffle entries allowing the STASHED team to focus on rewarding their real customers instead of spending time analyzing whether or not someone is a bot. The newfound time has allowed STASHED to improve their release calendar, delivery windows, customer support response time, and curate more personalized customer experiences (i.e. developing email strategies and events).

• ‍Acquiring 100s of New Customers: Yofi helped STASHED with their releases and email platform by sorting through hundreds of thousands of profiles and removing the bots and duplicate accounts. So far, STASHED has achieved a 20% new-customer-win-rate for releases, a 15% incremental spend from these new customers, and has converted many newsletter signees into customers! Yofi helped transform releases and newsletter signups into a new customer acquisition machine.

• ‍Cleaner Data & Increased Customer Lifetime Value: It is common for bots to create accounts by entering raffles, signing up for newsletters, and purchasing products. All these accounts impact STASHED’s decision making by inflating their perceived number of unique customers and their marketing expenses. With Yofi, STASHED has been able to suppress thousands of fake accounts, which has allowed them to achieve better marketing metrics and an accurate analysis of their email campaign success.

• ‍Individualized Marketing Campaigns and Segments: STASHED has a diverse range of products and sells over 30 brands, each attracting different customers. Yofi has been able to create pinpoint customer segments and individualized product recommendations that significantly improved STASHED’s Open Rates, Click Rates, and Email Conversion Rates! These recommendations have enabled STASHED to tailor all their email marketing campaigns to individual customers to ensure that each customer is getting the products, offers, and events meaningful to them.   

‍Results:

"Beyond the financials, the rise of bots and bad actors has a significant impact on day to day operations.  By identifying 'true customers' prior to a transaction, we've decreased significant time spent on frivolous returns, fighting chargebacks and responding to customer service affording us an ability to be more agile in other areas of the business." - Evan Auerbach, Brand Director

Hours saved, 100s of new customers acquired, and a clean dataset for confidently making data-driven decisions. Since implementing Yofi, STASHED has significantly reduced the hours spent preventing bots and bad actors while accelerating new customer acquisition through existing sales channels and increasing lifetime value. Preventing bots has turned from a tedious core into a simple click with Yofi, enabling STASHED to implement new initiatives to reward its strong community. Together, STASHED and Yofi are united in continuing to find innovative ways to build a robust and lasting community with their true customers!