Apex Tool Company, a high-AOV industrial merchant, turned a historically weak year-end season into a major growth opportunity by improving how customers discovered complex, technical products online. By implementing Miva's AI-powered search tool, Vexture®, Apex drove a dramatic lift in peak-season revenue, proving that smarter product discovery can unlock outsized ROI even from existing traffic.
Apex Tool Company, a high-value industrial merchant, faced a recurring challenge: a predictable revenue slowdown during the final two months of the year. In a business defined by high Average Order Values (AOV), even minor declines in conversion during the critical November–December buying window created an outsized impact on annual revenue performance.
Apex's customers often search using highly specific part numbers, technical specifications, and industry terminology. Traditional ecommerce search tools struggled to interpret these complex queries, frequently returning incomplete or zero-result pages. This friction disrupted high-intent buying journeys and caused Apex to lose revenue precisely when demand should have been strongest.
To address these challenges, Apex implemented Vexture®, Miva's AI-powered search solution. Unlike traditional keyword-based search tools, Vexture is designed to understand the intent behind complex industrial queries, connecting shoppers to the correct products even when searches include technical shorthand or partial specifications.
By ensuring every search led to relevant results, Vexture eliminated a major point of friction in Apex's customer journey. The goal was to ensure shoppers in the complex industrial sector could find technical products quickly and easily, effectively converting existing traffic into high-value orders. With shoppers able to find products faster, they hoped to reduce abandonment and increase the likelihood that high-intent searches converted into completed orders. This was a critically needed improvement in a high-AOV environment.
The ROI we saw from Vexture was immediate. In just one month, the increase in revenue was enough to pay for the entire search solution for the next five years. It turned our traditionally slowest period into our primary growth driver.
Fred Neff |The impact of Vexture's search implementation was both immediate and transformative. In November 2025, Apex achieved a 57% revenue lift against its historical baseline, effectively reversing years of seasonal underperformance during the company's most important revenue period.
Performance gains extended beyond baseline recovery. Apex outperformed November 2024 by 16%, demonstrating that improved product discovery did more than stabilize revenue–it unlocked new growth from existing traffic.
Because each successful search had the potential to result in a high-value order, the financial impact scaled rapidly. The incremental revenue generated in a single month was enough to cover the cost of Vexture® for the next five years, delivering an unusually fast and measurable return on investment.
For high-AOV industrial merchants, even small improvements in product discovery can have a massive financial impact. By eliminating search friction and leveraging AI to provide better product discovery, Apex Tool Company transformed a seasonal revenue liability into a sustained competitive advantage.