The shift from brick-and-mortar retail to ecommerce wasn’t too difficult for retailers selling simple and easy-to-ship products. For large-ticket item retailers like furniture, it likely has been much more challenging. Fortunately, technology now makes that transition much easier.
Make sure you leverage these key ecommerce technology features as tools for your marketing strategy.
The internet is frequently the first stop when a consumer is looking to buy. This is equally true for furniture shoppers who often start with online research for everything from furniture features to store locations. This pre-shopping can be a major time-saver for customers. Pre-shopping also helps drive sales in stores as an educated consumer is typically more qualified by the time they walk in your stores’ doors.
A location-based shopping experience can ensure a customer’s online experience is reflective of their local store. This is driven by the use of geolocation technology, which is included in some ecommerce technologies. Geolocation automatically locates where the online user is and presents accurate information about local marketing and merchandising as well as inventory and delivery or pickup options.
Localization synchronizes your online and brick-and-mortar store, engaging customers as they move between the two and offering a tailored experience for each shopper.
A personalized shopping experience is expected by over half of all consumers. Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all website, furniture ecommerce platforms that use personalization technology can deliver a curated website through customer segmentation based on characteristics such as location, how users found your website, how users interact with your website, or shopping history.
One valuable facet of personalization is the ability to include product recommendations for your website visitors. The best furniture ecommerce technology will allow you to create rules for additional product display or using AI-driven recommendations. Both strategies increase website engagement, increase time spent on the website, and display products the user may not have seen organically.
Accurate, curated, and personalized content also increases shopper engagement. When you manage your website content effectively, you can align your website tactics with organizational strategy.
When researching ecommerce platforms, make sure that the content management technology includes:
Your entire furniture ecommerce platform must integrate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, including the content management feature. This integration allows for accurate data throughout the buyer’s journey to product delivery.
Most catalog management systems or product information management (PIMs) systems aren’t designed for the unique needs of furniture retailers. Utilizing ecommerce technology built for furniture sales will allow you to fully describe your products and display them optimally, including variations and groupings, and customization options.
The constant in furniture retail is that things change regularly. Managing information about events or holidays, seasonal product lines, new promotions or even simply keeping your website fresh can be time-consuming. Selecting an ecommerce solution that lets you create, preview, and schedule new content means your content can change automatically when you want while knowing the content shows exactly what you want.
Customers today want a seamless shopping experience across all channels, whether they start online and finish in-store or vice versa.
Blueport offers technology features to help drive sales both online and in-store.
OneView integrates both online and offline shopping into one compelling and personalized path. With Blueport’s patented sales attribution technology, your sales team can access a customer’s online shopping cart, show them the selected products, and finalize the order.
For customers who start in the brick-and-mortar store, sales associates can save a shopper’s selected products to OneView allowing the customer to convert their shopping cart at home.
All of these technologies are pieces of a larger omnichannel experience.
To learn more about omnichannel ecommerce, tips on how to build a strategy for it, and how to leverage these essential ecommerce technologies, check out our guide Develop Your Strategy for Today’s Omnichannel Ecommerce World.