HIGH POINT — It’s important that all e-commerce transactions are seamless from start to finish. To that end, Furniture Today reached out to several industry experts for their best-practice suggestions.
One piece of advice we heard from all of our industry experts: shop your own website. The only real way to know what your e-commerce customer is experiencing, is to go through it first-hand.
 Andy Long |
Andy Long, head of sales
Blueport Commerce
- Offer clear and detailed product data; there is absolutely no substitute.
The more attributes your systems have about a given product or set of products in your inventory, the more accurate and helpful you can make search results for customers who are doing research or searching for specifics. It’s a labor of love that takes time and persistence, as product data can be extensive and may change over time, but the payoff is well worth the investment.
- Provide site visitors with the preferred search options they demonstrate to you through their onsite behavior.
Some people prefer to land on the homepage of a retail website and search for the products they want using keywords in a search bar. Others would rather use faceted search and seek out products using a process of elimination. Still others like to “hunt and peck” around a site by using the site navigation links to dive into categories and subcategories until they find what they want.
The point here is not to ask your customers to choose the search method you feel is best. The goal is to allow your customer to find what they want with as little friction in that process as possible.
For example, if your customers don’t tend to use an on-site search bar to help locate the products they’re looking for, then investing into an expensive semantic search tool that will auto-complete searches and auto-correct misspelling to streamline that type of behavior won’t add much value to the customer experience.
- Use a tool that will provide the ability to quickly develop accurate promotions based on current inventory across markets.
A well-timed promotion with the right messaging can drive significant revenue, or it can cost you dearly if executed incorrectly. Inaccurate or conflicting information tied to product promotions is one of the fastest ways to cut deeply into profit margins and create confusion among buyers.
It’s important to be able to preview your promotions and identify potential errors before publishing those promotions live on your website.
 Gary Galloway |
Gary Galloway, head of product marketing
Netsertive
Clear the path to purchase.
Evaluating the path to purchase is essential. As in, how many clicks does it to take (for a consumer to go) from product selection to checkout? The fewer clicks the better, and there’s a strong correlation between path-to-purchase and the conversion rate.
Offer various payment methods.
It’s best to have as many payment options as possible, including Apple Pay, Pay Pal, Google Pay, etc. Many people have accounts already set up in one of those systems, and they can literally check out with a face scan on their iPhone X or a thumbprint on other mobile devices.
- The call-to-action should be obvious.
Having a clear, concise, call-to-action beside or under the product to be purchased is something that a lot of companies miss. It can be as simple as a “Buy Now” button in a contrasting color so users don’t have to look for it.
Scott Hill, executive chairman and co-founder
Perq
 Scott Hill |
- Give digital consumers the same level of attention and care online that showroom walk-ins receive.
Your website needs to act like part of your sales team, while your in-store staff needs to understand how to better engage with online customers, which is pretty much every single customer.
Because shoppers no longer visit five or six showrooms before they buy and instead replace those footsteps with online research, it’s critical to build a relationship with them digitally before they enter the store. To do this, your website needs to engage and guide shoppers step-by-step through the research and shopping funnel, helping them narrow their options until they are ready to come into the showroom and transact.
- Evaluate digital spend in the same way the in-store sales team is measured.
Assessing which digital activities are ultimately generating sales and transactions online or in-store is the only way to calculate return-on-investment (ROI). Crucial to this is being able to track consumers throughout the online research process and into your showroom.
This means putting procedures in place that track online leads from the first point of contact to the last, showing the real revenue that is tied back to an individual and understanding the path they took to complete the sale.
- Personalize engagement with digital consumers to drive more sales.
Whether consumers are in the discovery, research or buying phase, your website should be interacting with them on a one-to-one basis, collecting data points and information that will help them as they make their decision.
By increasing your online engagement, you will be able to maximize both your digital and physical interactions with consumers. This is not as tricky or techy as it sounds. For example, there are easy-to-implement artificial intelligence-driven tools that can transform your existing website to enable you to collect more consumer profile information.
 Jesse Akre |
Jesse Akre, president
RetailSystem North America
Treat it as a business since there is no e-commerce “Easy Button.”
As a retailer, you must understand that while e-commerce is exciting and full of adventure, it is a business like any other business. If e-commerce was as easy as having a site with a cart, then every retailer would be successful. For this reason, it’s important to set expectations and then plan a strategy around those documented expectations.
Maximize where you are strongest since sales is a numbers game.
On the website, it’s necessary to have a deep and wide assortment of the products that drive your business. In other words, if you have eight tables in-store, have 80 online; if you have six styles of chairs in-store, show 60 styles online. In order to have a relevant deep and wide selection, it might be necessary to add a few vendors to strengthen your offerings.
- Set up your website as a true digital representation of your primary showroom down to the fonts, colors and imagery.
More than 70% of consumers begin their home furnishings journey online. Most consumers still buy in-store. Do not deliver mixed messages. It’s a killer.
Retailers have spent generations defining who they are in-store. They have selected lines. They have defined services. They have a look and feel that seems to do the trick. However, many times their website is a complete disconnect.
 Ryan Fitzpatrick |
Ryan Fitzpatrick, senior director of category management
Wayfair
- Have outstanding visual merchandising.
Shoppers tend to find value in product imagery that inspires as much as it informs, so beautiful room scenes and vignettes that illustrate ways that a customer might style the product in their home perform well online. When shopping for the home online, customers respond to high-quality imagery that looks great and helps them make better decisions.
- Make it as easy as possible for customers to shop for home, from home.
Having a robust catalog is great, but as more shoppers make high-consideration purchases online it’s becoming more important to have what are considered higher-technology tools.
For example, customers like to use augmented reality to see how items look and fit in their actual space. They are starting to search with photo options that allow them to find visual matches of items they see in the real world, and they enjoy perusing curated collections that provide style inspiration.
- Think in terms of lifetime customer acquisition.
Once a customer places an order, his journey isn’t over. The e-commerce experience needs to be seamless all the way from discovery to delivery, and brands need to make that process consistently outstanding over time to earn trust and loyalty. Even the heaviest, bulkiest items should ship fast and conveniently, and customers should expect nothing less than a best-in-class delivery experience.