What better way to spend your Monday nights than watching
two single charming twin brothers battle it out in home designs in the popular
TV series Brother VS. Brother? The main sponsor of their design show is home
furnishings and décor retailer Wayfair. Being a first time home buyer I am
super excited about the opportunity to turn my Pinterest home décor boards into
reality with the help of the newly launched Wayfair Canada website.
Source: (Wayfair.ca)
Founded in 2002, Wayfair
is the biggest online furniture and décor retailer in the U.S. It recently
spreaded its wings to new markets when earlier this year they launched
officially in Canada. In Canada, Wayfair is competing against Ikea, Winners,
HomeSense and Home Outfitters owned by Hudson Bay. “According to the company’s 2014
annual report, Wayfair delivered 5.2 million orders in 2014, reaching $1.3
billion U.S. in net revenue. The challenge for online retailers without a brick
and mortar presence is making themselves known to the public. When all you are
is an online retailer, it’s easy to be invisible, so you have to spend a lot of
money on marketing in order to really generate awareness (Kopun, 2016).” This brings us to the exciting world of e-commerce. E-commerce allows for the sale and purchase of goods and services online. It provides an increased audience exposure to organizations such as your local mom and pop stores, putting them on the map and allowing them to see increased revenues. As consumers crave more convenient options, e-commerce becomes a viable option for businesses. Being an online only retailer, Wayfair has to ensure it has a solid analytics and web metrics tool in place to ensure its not missing out on conversions.
Upon visiting Wayfair’s website, you are greeted with bright warm colours and colourful graphics. They have a search bar which is front and centre allowing you to quickly find that bar stool that you came to the website searching for. The first thing I noticed when I visited Wayfair’s website was the offer for free shipping all duties included. Yes, I said it, absolutely FREE, I don’t have to worry about unexpected charges once I place my order. Shipping charges kills conversions, approximately “28% of shoppers will abandon their shopping cart if presented with unexpected shipping costs (Kissmetrics, n.d.).”
What I found really interesting was that their email subscription sign-up box was located at the very end of their webpage, the footer. This makes perfect sense, as its likely that if persons are at the bottom of your webpage, they are highly engaged with your content, they are interested in what you have to offer thus creating a quality email list.
By checking their
source code, we are able to determine that they are utilizing Google
Analytics. As we have been discussing
thus far on this blog, Google analytics can help you determine traffic sources,
high ranking pages, the geographical segmentation of your visitors along with a
variety of other metrics that can help you further understand visitors to your
website to help drive conversions. Wayfair collects customer data in a number
of ways. In order to make purchases on their website, visitors are forced to
create an account. Visitors have the option of creating an ideas board similar
to Pinterest, but once again, if you aren’t a customer, you are forced to
create an account. They also have a trade program for designers along with a
business program which offers competitive pricing, these programs all require
registration.
All of these options not only help users find what they want more easily but helps them stay longer on your website decreasing your bounce rate. They have grouped their products into top categories, limited time sales, ways to save as well as the option to shop by room making the process smoother for their website visitors. As you navigate through the website and click on products, you can able to view verified buyer reviews to help with your purchase decisions. “55% of shoppers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions (Kissmetrics, n.d.).”
“If an e-commerce
site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost
you $2.5 million in lost sales every year (Kissmetrics, n.d.).” Those are
important numbers to consider, a page load test reveals that the Wayfair
website takes 367ms to load. This is good as,”47% of consumers expect a web
page to load in 2 seconds or less (Kissmetrics, n.d.).” As you can see from the
various examples, mentioned above, the Wayfair website is fully optimized.
Since 2008, they have been using a tool called Sitespect to run various experiments. Through Sitespect, they “have been able to test front-end usability, back-end functionality, dynamic content, the mobile web experience and native mobile apps using a variety of SiteSpect solutions (Fiorletta, 2014).” Another tool which Wayfair uses is called Limelight, the limelight solution was adopted to help Wayfair reduce its bounce rate, and increase time on site to help drive conversions (Lime Light Networks, 2012).
In order to make purchases on Wayfair’s website, one has to register on their website. “23% of users will abandon their shopping cart if they have to create a new user account (Kissmetrics, n.d.).” I am certainly one of those persons, adding a guest checkout option could prove helpful for Wayfair in terms of providing a no hassle approach to checkouts. An easy registration process such as just adding your email address with the option to complete your profile at a later date could also prove beneficial for Wayfair. Incentives such as a 10% discount could be used to help get visitors to return and complete their profiles. An SEO on page optimization search revealed that they do not have a meta description for their website. While this doesn’t help you rank in search engines, it’s a good idea to have this completed, as it’s a good area to include a call to action description that can get persons to click on your website, instead of moving on to the next search page result. Being active on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, I think using a tool such as Sprout Social could prove helpful in helping them manage their social media platforms. It integrates with Google Analytics and can provide a bigger picture of how social activities drive traffic and sales.
Reference List
Fiorletta, A. (2014, March 14). Wayfair Boosts Revenue With SiteSpect . Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: http://www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/wayfair-boosts-revenue-with-sitespect
Kopun, F. (2016, January 7). Online home decor retailer Wayfair launches Canadian website. Retrieved June 25, 2016 from: https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/01/07/online-home-decor-retailer-wayfair-launches-canadian-website.html
Kissmetrics. (n.d.). 5 Ecommerce Stats That Will Make You Change Your Entire Marketing Approach. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/5-ecommerce-stats/
Kissmetrics. (n.d.). How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
Lime Light Networks. (2012, February 28). Wayfair.com Implements Limelight Accelerate to Reduce Bounce Rates, Increase Time on the Site, and Drive Online Conversions. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2012/02/28/469229/247350/en/Wayfair-com-Implements-Limelight-Accelerate-to-Reduce-Bounce-Rates-Increase-Time-on-the-Site-and-Drive-Online-Conversions.html
All of these options not only help users find what they want more easily but helps them stay longer on your website decreasing your bounce rate. They have grouped their products into top categories, limited time sales, ways to save as well as the option to shop by room making the process smoother for their website visitors. As you navigate through the website and click on products, you can able to view verified buyer reviews to help with your purchase decisions. “55% of shoppers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions (Kissmetrics, n.d.).”
Source: (Kissmetrics, n.d.)
Since 2008, they have been using a tool called Sitespect to run various experiments. Through Sitespect, they “have been able to test front-end usability, back-end functionality, dynamic content, the mobile web experience and native mobile apps using a variety of SiteSpect solutions (Fiorletta, 2014).” Another tool which Wayfair uses is called Limelight, the limelight solution was adopted to help Wayfair reduce its bounce rate, and increase time on site to help drive conversions (Lime Light Networks, 2012).
In order to make purchases on Wayfair’s website, one has to register on their website. “23% of users will abandon their shopping cart if they have to create a new user account (Kissmetrics, n.d.).” I am certainly one of those persons, adding a guest checkout option could prove helpful for Wayfair in terms of providing a no hassle approach to checkouts. An easy registration process such as just adding your email address with the option to complete your profile at a later date could also prove beneficial for Wayfair. Incentives such as a 10% discount could be used to help get visitors to return and complete their profiles. An SEO on page optimization search revealed that they do not have a meta description for their website. While this doesn’t help you rank in search engines, it’s a good idea to have this completed, as it’s a good area to include a call to action description that can get persons to click on your website, instead of moving on to the next search page result. Being active on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, I think using a tool such as Sprout Social could prove helpful in helping them manage their social media platforms. It integrates with Google Analytics and can provide a bigger picture of how social activities drive traffic and sales.
Reference List
Fiorletta, A. (2014, March 14). Wayfair Boosts Revenue With SiteSpect . Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: http://www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/wayfair-boosts-revenue-with-sitespect
Kopun, F. (2016, January 7). Online home decor retailer Wayfair launches Canadian website. Retrieved June 25, 2016 from: https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/01/07/online-home-decor-retailer-wayfair-launches-canadian-website.html
Kissmetrics. (n.d.). 5 Ecommerce Stats That Will Make You Change Your Entire Marketing Approach. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/5-ecommerce-stats/
Kissmetrics. (n.d.). How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
Lime Light Networks. (2012, February 28). Wayfair.com Implements Limelight Accelerate to Reduce Bounce Rates, Increase Time on the Site, and Drive Online Conversions. Retrieved June 26, 2016 from: http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2012/02/28/469229/247350/en/Wayfair-com-Implements-Limelight-Accelerate-to-Reduce-Bounce-Rates-Increase-Time-on-the-Site-and-Drive-Online-Conversions.html
