Furniture.com launches style suggestion service
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, August 4, 2003
Waltham, Mass. — With traffic and site use trending significantly upward, Furniture.com has added a service designed both to convert more shoppers to buyers as well as to utilize more of the vast amounts of data collected by the site on shopping and buying behavior.
The new service from Furniture.com, which had a soft launch July 21, gives visitors the option of using their demonstrated tastes to generate suggestions, much like Amazon.com has successfully done in books. The Web site's database also matches up customers based on similar likes and dislikes, which are determined by what users place in their shopping carts and what they buy.
The service is a response to the confusion surrounding definitions of furniture style categories, a challenge faced by all furniture retailers. Instead of asking shoppers to define their desired style or to choose from ambiguously defined categories, the new Recommendation Center offers suggestions based on their online behavior.
"One person's modern can be another's eclectic," said Carl Prindle, Furniture.com president. "I consider myself a contemporary customer, but when I used our own Recommendation Center, it matched me up with a traditional lamp I really like."
Like Amazon.com's "New for You" feature for book and music titles, Furniture.com's Recommendation Center in home furnishings is an attempt to make better use of the enormous amount of data generated by the Web. In brick-and-mortar stores, pre-purchase behavior is difficult to track. Online, what a customer clicks, including which thumbnails he or she enlarges and what is put into a shopping cart, can provide valuable information.
"There is so much information out there (generated) ahead of the purchase," Prindle said. "We can see if there is a pricing issue, for example, by identifying what is going into shopping carts but perhaps not purchased. We can see what looks catch on by tracking what is consistently getting the clicks."
This data is available to all 130 Levitz and Seaman's stores that are a part of the Furniture.com network. Prindle said he hopes the Recommendation Center and, more importantly, the data it capitalizes on, will spur retailers to partner with Furniture.com.
"It is one of many enhancements we've been making on behalf of our (retail) partners," Prindle said. "We've put about a half-million man-hours of work into the site. We have a lot to offer" furniture retailers.
According to Prindle, more than 1 million items are viewed each day at Furniture.com. Since April, the number of page views has climbed 50% to 750,000 per day from 500,000.
"We're very pleased also with our search engine positioning," Prindle said. "We consistently get the top spot" when the key word "furniture" is searched.
A test proved Prindle correct. Furniture.com was the top finding at Google and Lycos, and the No. 3 finding at Yahoo.
Anticipating privacy concerns, the Recommendation Center feature uses only aggregated data. No individual information about shoppers is disclosed. Additionally, users can opt out of the database altogether by notifying the site.
"We're heavily committed to privacy," Prindle said. "We're members of TRUSTe. I think we wrote one of TRUSTe's first privacy policies some five years ago."
Prindle said he hopes the new feature provides another compelling reason to partner with Furniture.com.
Alan Rosenberg, president and chief executive officer at Levitz, said the partnership with Furniture.com has provided maximum return at a minimum risk.
"We could be trying to build an Internet shopping cart ourselves," he said. "Instead, we're focusing on our business while profiting from Furniture.com's Internet system."
Privately held, Furniture.com is funded by Resurgence Asset Management, which also owns a large stake in Levitz/Seaman's.
