NEW YORK — As it closes in on a year post-launch, Furniture.com has been intentional in building a growth model that returns value to its retail partners in a sustainable manner.
That approach is working. Without much of a consumer-facing marketing push (that’s coming this year in a big way), the furniture aggregator — which directs customers to retail partners through search and discovery — has delivered its partners valuable traffic. Forty percent of the shoppers coming through Furniture.com to retailers are new to their brand, bringing with them a purchase rate that is two to three times higher than branded search channels and up to eight times higher than nonbranded search.
“As we come out of year one from a Furniture.com site technology point of view, the first year was the proof of concept to some degree. Now we feel we’ve done that,” Alex Seaman, Furniture.com’s senior vice president, told Furniture Today. “The site performance we’re seeing is strong. Now as we move into year two, we have a huge focus on traffic growth and integrating partners fast to keep up with the heavy interest.”
This year’s growth will be facilitated in part by a full-funnel marketing test in the Tampa, Detroit and Houston markets that launches in May, with plans to expand the campaign this year towards a full national campaign by 2025.
While its traffic is already at or ahead of early projections, officials think the site is poised to take a significant leap forward in terms of delivering customers to partners, which now number at around 40 retailers from across the country with another dozen in late stages of onboarding.
“Traffic-wise, we’re right about where we thought we would be because we intentionally haven’t yet done full marketing,” said Dan Russotto, general manager. “Going into this second year, now that we’ve got stable traffic growth, we hope to have more of a hockey stick going into the next year as we do commercials and more social and email marketing.
“Organically, we’re where we thought we would be, if not a touch better. The large growth and traffic is yet to come once we do a full marketing campaign.”
Russotto said once retailers understand that Furniture.com delivers shoppers to its retail partners, they’re more willing to buy in.
“When they find out we’re passing the shopper on to them as opposed to trying to hold them on our site and that our retail partners’ now own the customer that’s been delivered to transact on their e-commerce sites or in their stores, that’s a huge value add to them and different to other models out there,” he said. “We’re not hijacking the customer from them; we’re passing the customer to them and helping build their brand.”
By bringing retailers together, Furniture.com grows shoppers’ intent by giving them one place where they have choice, ability to compare, style guidance and content. In many ways, creating a site that brings retailers and their offerings together helps them build a presence that’s competitive against some of the largest online brands.
“Furniture.com gives retailers another lever to pull against some of these giant platforms that even some of the biggest brands in the world are beholden to,” said Dan Bennett, chief marketing officer. “There is nobody specifically servicing the furniture shopper, and this allows our retail partners to fight back a little. By providing technology and marketing tools and services, Furniture.com connects them to more of those high-value shoppers across the online and brick-and-mortar thresholds.”
Matching high-intent shoppers and store locations on the site creates more of an opportunity to generate significant sales, online and in store.
“One of the biggest things retailers are compelled by is the in-store piece. The fact is we don’t only let them own the customer online, we also have so much logic built into the site enabling a journey where we send customers to the stores,” Seaman said. “Our retail partners are often seeing very high in-store sales attributed to Furniture.com, maybe even more so than on e-commerce. When you get a shopper in the store, it’s infinitely more valuable.”
Seaman said as more partners are onboarded, seeing results and offering feedback, that value will only rise, creating more of a sustainable, successful ecosystem. “Who better to advise us as we develop an experience to serve furniture shoppers than the retailers who know them best,” she explained.
“We have spent this last year, and we’re only scratching the surface, building all these different tools, features, technologies into the site with our partners’ feedback that makes it stickier and builds up the shopper’s intent as they make their way from furniture.com to the retailer,” Seaman said. “By the time they’re there, they’re much more likely to buy.”
Beyond the focused campaign that launches in May, Furniture.com has more in store this year. Bennett wants the site to be able to stack up against other large marketplaces and for it to be where furniture consumers begin their search and discovery.
“Our mission is to build technologies for the furniture industry. Unlike the biggest companies out there, we’re only focused on furniture. When you couple that with new ways of searching, we’re certainly going to have product that delivers against that consumer need,” he said. “We’re looking at those emerging technologies and media consumption patterns that a technology company needs to be ahead of. In partnership with our retailers, as we grow, we can go to bat against the biggest data and technology companies out there with a unique furniture perspective.
“Coming into 2025, we’re going to be building this brand at a national level,” Bennett added. “My responsibility and aim is to develop furniture.com into a household name. If a furniture shopper doesn’t know what brand of furniture they’re looking for, which is true of nearly 75% of online shoppers, we want furniture.com to be the place they go.”
See also: Marketplace models look to create a one-stop digital shop for all things home