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Turning Browsers into Buyers: Hirsch's Achieves 11% Revenue Contribution with Personalization
The story of a 45-year legacy brand that refused to let digital feel impersonal
11%
Revenue
7 Day
Go-Live
The story of a 45-year legacy brand that refused to let digital feel impersonal
For 45 years, Hirsch’s has built its reputation on one thing: making every customer feel remembered. From its first store to a nationwide omnichannel presence, the brand’s edge has always been personal service. When that same warmth needed to be translated online, Netcore stepped in – and the results arrived within the first month.
South Africa’s retail landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. With e-commerce growing rapidly and global players staking their claim, independent retailers are no longer competing on price or product range alone – they’re competing on experience.
The rules have changed. Customers who shop online expect the same attentiveness they get in a great physical store. They expect to be remembered. They expect relevance. And in a market growing more crowded by the year, the brands that deliver this consistently are the ones that win.
For a brand like Hirsch’s, with 45 years of world-class in-store service behind it, this wasn’t a foreign concept. It was home turf. The challenge was making sure the digital experience lived up to the in-store legacy.
Hirsch’s is one of South Africa’s most trusted retail brands, offering a wide range of home appliances, consumer electronics, and furniture. Founded in 1979, the brand has grown into a formidable omnichannel retailer with a strong physical and digital presence – and a reputation for service that sets it apart from every competitor.
The brand’s north star has always been the same: know your customer. Hirsch’s staff don’t just sell appliances. They remember what you browsed last week. They walk you back to the product you hesitated on. They create the kind of retail moment that turns a first-time store visitor into a loyal customer for life.
With over 372,000 monthly visitors arriving at their website, Hirsch’s had successfully built significant digital reach. The audience was there. The interest was there. What was missing was the digital equivalent of that attentive sales assistant – a mechanism that could replicate the brand’s signature personal touch in an online environment.
The insight that would define this story was simple – but the cost of ignoring it was significant.
Hirsch’s wasn’t losing customers at the awareness stage. They were losing them after the interest had already been earned. Users were landing on product pages, spending time comparing features and prices, and then quietly leaving – with no mechanism to bring them back to what they’d shown genuine intent on.
Their existing tool, Everlytic, was built for campaigns. It could broadcast to the database. What it couldn’t do was watch a user browse a Samsung refrigerator, note that interest in real time, and resurface that product the next time they visited. There was no behavioral memory. No real-time personalization layer. Every month, hundreds of thousands of visits – and the purchase intent they carried – were going to waste.
Hirsch’s needed a partner who could move fast and deliver personalization that actually felt personal. Netcore stood out for its real-time behavioral targeting capabilities, intuitive platform, proven track record with leading retail brands, and a CSM team known for hands-on execution. Their previous tool had been campaign-only – Netcore was built for exactly what came next.
Rather than a sweeping overhaul, Netcore identified the single highest-impact intervention: the Recently Viewed Widget. The approach was deliberate – map the drop-off, deploy the fix, go live fast.
The results came quickly – and they were decisive.
Within the first month of the Recently Viewed Widget going live, it contributed to 11% of Hirsch’s total website revenue. This wasn’t revenue generated through additional ad spend or new traffic acquisition. It was drawn entirely from visitors who were already on the site – high-intent shoppers who previously would have left without converting.
Beyond the headline number, something more foundational had shifted. Hirsch’s had found a way to bring its signature personal touch into the digital journey. The widget didn’t feel like a piece of technology to customers – it felt like the store remembered them. Which, for a brand built on exactly that feeling, is everything.
Devashen Govender
Marketing Director, Hirsch’s“Netcore’s web personalization feature helped us enhance the browsing experience on Hirsch’s website through the Recently Viewed widget. By surfacing products customers had previously viewed, it has already contributed to around 11% of our website revenue within the first month.”
For Hirsch’s, the success of this first personalization intervention is both a result and a starting point. The brand has proven that on-site personalization can drive meaningful, measurable revenue – and that the best digital experiences aren’t necessarily the most complex ones. Sometimes the most powerful move is the simplest: remembering what your customer cared about, and showing it to them again.
For other independent retailers navigating South Africa’s fast-evolving commerce landscape, the story carries a clear message: you don’t need to be the biggest brand on the internet. You just need to be the most attentive one.
