Your website is a critical component of your business and often the first stop for your customers before they walk in your showroom doors. In today's omnichannel world, your website acts as a tool to drive customers to your store and also enables shoppers to browse your products, understand your brand, and purchase online.
In addition to serving your customers, your website also needs to empower your business teams — IT, Marketing, Merchandising, and more. Each functional area plays a key role in your website, and in turn, your website platform needs to support various functional roles.
If your website is not supporting both your customers and your business teams — it may be time to make a change. In this blog, we’ll explore three signs that suggest you should explore a new furniture ecommerce platform.
3 Signs You Need a New Furniture Ecommerce Solution
1. Your Website Doesn’t Support Both In-store and Online Sales
Many generic ecommerce platforms are not designed for big ticket and highly considered items like furniture. The result may be that your website isn’t able to give customers the critical information they need to motivate them to visit your store — or to purchase online.
Your website should offer customers the ability to search and browse your products, find real-time pricing, availability, and product information that ultimately, encourage shoppers to either purchase online or visit a store. Further, when a customer visits your showroom, your website should be viewed as a tool for your salespeople, especially when working with customers who are not ready to buy the same day.
Creating an omnichannel experience allows customers to move between in-store and at-home shopping while still maintaining a relationship with their salesperson. The outcome is a better shopping experience for your customers, stronger client relationships for your sales team, and ultimately higher revenue.
2. Your Ecommerce Platform Requires Excessive Administration
How much time does your team spend managing your website and online store? The wrong furniture ecommerce platform requires excessive administrative effort, time, and expense.
With generic platforms, your marketing team may be burning the midnight oil to ensure promotions and content are as they expect at the minute the sale goes live; your back office team may be spending hours manually entering online orders into your ERP, and your IT team may be spending time on creating custom solutions, upgrading to the latest platform version, or monitoring hosting and security.
To mitigate these challenges, you need an ecommerce tech stack that offers trouble-free operation as well as:
Operational efficiency. Blueport integrates seamlessly with your ERP for automated online order injection into your ERP just as a salesperson would enter it.
Comprehensive merchandising and content tools. Blueport includes the furniture features you need out of the box, including a PIM system for furniture for your extensive product catalog, advanced search and sorting capabilities, product recommendations, customer segmentation, sophisticated promotion management, and robust content management.
Promotion and Content Preview Tools. Sophisticated content tools allow your team to set up content and promotions, events, schedule them for future dates, and preview the site in advance - just as it will look when the events go live.
3. Your Furniture Ecommerce Website Doesn’t Provide a High ROI
Other ecommerce technologies may not deliver a high return on investment (ROI). They often lack tools to drive online sales and in-store traffic, may not support the third party integrations you need, and don’t have a development roadmap based on the latest retail furniture industry trends or the latest technology advances. As a result, they don’t deliver benefits that make the investment worthwhile.
For a high ROI, you need to maximize the value derived from the solution and minimize costs. An all-in-one furniture ecommerce platform is designed specifically to meet the needs of your website visitors, help in-store shoppers, and help you achieve your business revenue goals.
Because it is built for your industry, it also reduces expenses with the native furniture-focused features you need. To maximize your ROI, Blueport incorporates machine learning algorithms for smart product recommendations to increase revenue, fraud detection to protect your business and customers, and more.
Blueport’s innovative platform leverages today’s cutting-edge technologies while being well-positioned to easily incorporate tomorrow’s technology. With Blueport, you can implement the right furniture ecommerce solution with full confidence that you won’t need to add a budget line item for a future ecommerce re-platform.
The Benefits of a Furniture Ecommerce Re-platform
What can a furniture ecommerce re-platform do for your business? If you’re using an outdated ecommerce solution, you’ve probably recognized your own challenges while reading this.
Check out one example of how Levin Furniture increased its ecommerce revenue by 133% with Blueport, and they shared how Blueport’s technology helped them increase website traffic and sales, nearly double their conversion rate, improve the customer experience, and more. How did they describe their success?
“Everyone asked me what I was doing, but I wasn’t really doing anything. Blueport gave us the tools and solutions to deliver our results!”
Download the Levin Furniture case study today and see how Blueport can give you the tools and solutions you need.
