Furniture Village retails an extensive range of higher-end furniture with over 30 locations across the UK. The changing habits of shoppers have resulted in this initial transactional website. For the initial ecommerce website, a bespoke .Net solution was created. The website was served as a portfolio of products offering customers the ability to make online purchases of only the top 50 products. With the increasing success of furniturevillage.com, came changing online consumer behavior and the need for a more engaging website complete with extensive online marketing and content management tools.
“ True’s results are outstanding. Despite the most challenging climate furniture retailers have faced in decades, our store visits are up 25% and overall sales up 35% year on year. True are more than our agency, they’re a part of our business. „
- Eamon Wynne, Sales and Operations Director, Furniture Village
Challenge
Furniture Village sought a new platform to support substantial increases in website traffic. Because of increased online buying Furniture Village planned a significant expansion of products. To improve marketing engagement, stronger CMS capabilities and online marketing tools were required to deliver the right content and promotional information.
Multimedia
Retailing has been rapidly changing in recent years in part because the technology available to both online retailers and online shoppers has changed expectations. Consumers now expect to find in-store kiosks to help them find products, pricing, inventory and other information to help them make a purchasing decision.
Aiming to maximise the effectiveness of marketing activities, Furniture Village sought a platform that would enable more advanced marketing tools, and enhance internal communications to more quickly and cohesively disseminate product information, sales best practices and training collateral.
Solution
Having experienced great success by partnering with True to develop the initial bespoke .NET solution and systems integration, Furniture Village again selected True as their technology partner. True began the project by holding interviews with stakeholders to truly understand needs and requirements. True redesigned customer journeys to reflect changing visitor requirements and adapt to redesigned web pages. To improve the visitor experience they developed (integrated) several custom applications including a room planner and wardrobe configurator.
To give Furniture Village a stronger edge in a very competitive market, True focussed on improving elements of the visitor experience to make it easier to search types of products, search for specific products, know delivery time ahead of purchase, and offer an updated checkout process with less friction that could cause cart abandonment.
Result
True integrated Sitecore web content management system to deliver web technology that would enable marketers to develop effective marketing campaigns. The new website is inspirational and easy to browse whether for finding new ideas or specific products. True enhanced the purchasing pathway to improve shopping cart conversions.
True’s successful website redesign for Furniture Village has led to a remit which extends to the on-going management of Furniture Village’s online media planning and buying which includes personalised re-targeting, onsite search, affiliate programme, and an eCRM strategy to maximise prospect and customer value.
Maximising Existing Process
Furniture Village has many intricate internal web marketing processes. True integrated Sitecore to allow continuity of such processes such as multimedia management. Furniture Village uses an external image hosting solution which needed to work seamlessly with Sitecore.
Increased Inventory
The new website design and Sitecore CMS enable Furniture Village to now manage over 15,000 SKUs on the website. www.furniturevillage.co.uk offers visitors search capabilities beyond that of their competitors such as leather fabric, colour options and delivery availability.
Following the re-launch there are over 450,000 visitors per month with online sales having now surpassed £10 million per year. Following the website re-launch in-store visits have grown over 25% and overall sales have grown 35%. There are now over 60 in-store kiosks powered by the website where customers can also access items not available in-store. The growing success of the Sitecore has led to the development of a mobile website to be launched in fall 2011.