Gallery Furniture to resume online sales
Says it has more secure system now
Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, July 26, 2010
HOUSTON — Nine years after pulling the plug on its e-commerce business, Gallery Furniture is getting ready to dive back into online sales.Jim McIngvale, owner of the Top 100 company, said the new website will launch early next month with wide-ranging e-commerce capabilities - though limited to a certain geographical range around Houston. It also will have social networking and live chat features.
"We're excited about it," McIngvale said, adding that the company is updating its Escalate Retail software to accommodate online sales. Initially e-commerce will be offered in a 200-mile radius around Houston. "But once we get it going and work out the bugs, we'll try to expand," he said.
McIngvale said the two-store midpriced to high-end Gallery is looking to do about $2 million in sales through the galleryfurniture.com site in the first year and will be advertising it heavily.
The Top 100 company was one of the industry's earliest adopters of e-commerce, launching a site in 1999 with an investment of more than $1 million. But after a hacking incident that McIngvale said "created havoc with our banking system," the store shut it down.
What's different now, he said, is that he has "better people designing" the website, adding that it will be "more robust" than what Gallery offered 10 years ago.
He also said that the most successful consumer brands have an e-commerce presence, and he thinks Gallery should too.
"If we're going to be true merchants we have to have a virtual presence as well as a bricks-and-mortar presence," he said.
Robert Williams, Gallery's director of fun, marketing, e-commerce and social media, said the Escalate Retail software update includes the addition of Weblink, which can push sales tickets from online shopping carts into the physical store's software system for fulfillment.
"Our full line of product will be listed on our site for sale, as well as an Internet-only section with great savings on products we do not carry on our showroom floor," Williams said. He added that Gallery was granted the right to sell Tempur-Pedic products online in its market, a first for the Houston area.
The site is expected to launch Aug. 7, when McIngvale and his team return from shopping the Las Vegas Market.
Consumers will be able to shop from images and information on the website and also will be able to control showroom video cameras that can zoom in on products.
All the goods in the store will be tagged with multicolored Microsoft Meta tags that act along the lines of barcodes. The tags can be scanned by various smart phones, linking consumers back to the website for detailed information on the merchandise.
"We recently placed (one of tags) in a newspaper ad that was designed to take the user to a video commercial on the product," Williams said. "They work great."
Gallery plans to use the tags in other newspaper ads as well as in mailers and e-mails, routing consumers to the website, where they can get complete information and buy. The retailer also is developing wish lists and bridal registry capabilities for the website and is evaluating mobile media reward programs that award points to users for activity on the site.
In store, Gallery is equipping its sales staff with iPhones and already has rolled out iPads, which salespeople use for room planning and credit applications and also to get quick and complete product information, Williams said.
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