For a premier retailer like Sterling Collectables, the Q4 holiday window isn't just a busy time, but it's the most important sales period of their entire year. Specializing in fine silver ornaments and high-value mementos, they face a unique challenge of helping a massive influx of seasonal shoppers navigate a complex catalog of thousands of items in only a matter of weeks.
Historically, traditional keyword search was a bottleneck. If a shopper typed, "sterling angel" instead of, "silver holiday figurine," they were often met with a frustrating search result which contained no relevant results. Sterling needed a way to bridge the gap between how customers search and how products are indexed, without burdening their team to manually create and maintain merchandising rules.
Ahead of the 2025 shopping season, Sterling Collectables integrated Vexture®, Miva's native AI-powered search tool. The goal was simple. They wanted to move past literal keyword matching and use natural language processing (NLP) to actually understand shopper intent.
By implementing Vexture AI, Sterling aimed to:
Analyzing holiday performance is notoriously tricky because the seasonal surge can mask whether a new tool or changes to the commerce platform is actually working. To get a clear picture, Sterling moved away from comparing summer baselines to winter peaks. Instead, they looked at Year-Over-Year (YoY) data, comparing the 2025 holiday performance directly against the same window in 2024.
The data revealed that 2025 wasn't just a normal successful Q4 but became its performance outlier.
Vexture finally connects our customers to what they're really looking for. We saw an immediate lift in sales. Turning it on was drop-dead simple – and the results came almost instantly.
Sterling Collectables TeamThe YoY growth establishes that Sterling significantly outperformed its typical seasonal curve. However, the Vexture-specific data explains why. While silver prices did lead to a slight AOV lift, the massive jump in revenue was primarily driven by order volume.
Vexture-driven searches showed a significant lift in conversion efficiency compared to the site's previous search historical performance. By eliminating zero-result searches and surfacing more relevant products, Sterling didn't just wait for holiday traffic to arrive, they captured the attention of shoppers and converted it into sales.
"Vexture takes the guesswork out of how customers search," says Kelly from Sterling Collectables. "It's been a valuable addition not just for the customer experience, but for our own merchandising efficiency. We're finally connecting our customers to what they're actually looking for."
By putting Vexture® AI at the center of their Miva store, Sterling Collectables didn't just survive the holiday rush; they set a new internal record. The results prove that Vexture wasn't just a beneficiary of the season–it was the engine that helped Sterling maximize a high-intent window by making their catalog more discoverable than ever before.