In the Press
Total Bedroom Sets Its Sites on Sophisticated On-Site Search
With 55% year-over-year sales growth, furniture pure-play TotalBedroom.com is doing something-in fact, a great many things—right
Source: eTailer Magazine, August 2006
TotalBedroom.com sells home furnishings only via the Web, eschewing the conventional wisdom that says consumers won't shell out hundreds of dollars for a bed or thousands of dollars for a dining room set without being able to see or touch it first. According to executives for the three-year-old company, sales grew 55% last year, outpacing the 20%-30% online growth for the sector as a whole.
Vice president of marketing Jay Shaffer says that one reason for the company's success is the site's stellar search functionality. Given that TotalBedroom offers more than 15,000 products from about 50 vendors, effective on-site search is indeed a must. Shaffer explains to THE ETAILER how TotalBedroom ties its search function in with its overall business goals.
The eTailer: You've said that there is a lot of information about search that many e-commerce companies are not aware of. What sort of information?
Shaffer: The actual term "search" has grown and morphed into a broader and farreaching concept and responsibility. The real value of search and the true definition is to allow people to find the product they're looking for. The equation is, If I can match customer need with product, I should equal a conversion or a sale.
There are various facets of the search where it needs to work. One is that once the consumer arrives on your Website they need to be able to quickly fi nd the product. As I was saying [at the summer eTail Conference] about the "surgical shopper," a lot of the times these people are forgoing navigation. They arrive and just want to use the search box. They are your really savvy shoppers. They don't want to have to find out where [something is] in your mini-categories, within your navigation, how it works. They want to go right to the source.
The on-site search functionality needs to have flexibility, not only with search results but perhaps even to offer merchandise capabilities. It's more than just providing immediate results. You want to be able to influence those results, obviously give [customers] what they're looking for, but perhaps interject your merchandising desires within the results as well.
The eTailer: Can you give us some real-world examples?
Shaffer: If someone types in "platform bed," wouldn't you like to be able to highlight those that are on sale or a new arrival this week or what some of the customers' favorite picks are? If someone would type in "wood platform bed," you could get a lot more into the darker woods or lighter woods.
There are capabilities out there where you can tell if someone performing a search is a return visitor or not. And you might want to personalize the results you have, based on their previous shopping behavior. That's certainly an area a lot of people are working on.
The eTailer: Is this something that TotalBedroom is involved in?
Shaffer: Right now our site is really going after first-time shoppers. That's where the majority of the business is out there. In the world of online furniture you have a lot of people looking for replacement products or expansion. I don't believe in today's marketplace— though it's certainly where we want to go—that someone is sitting at home and saying, "Gee, honey, I think we need to redecorate the living room, so let's go online and find everything we need."
People who are actually looking today are very specific shoppers trying to replace a specific item because that's their comfort zone. That's where we as an industry are morphing to, trying to find a much more enhanced visualization that will allow people to actually configure a room.
The eTailer: So your site appeals to that "surgical shopper." What that does mean for someone reading this?
Shaffer: We make sure we have a really robust on-site search tool that's easy to use and allows some additional merchandising opportunities.
If they're coming in to do surgical shopping, you've got a few places to speak to them on the home page. They've dropped something into the search box, and boom! here come the results. They're removing, through their search behavior, some of the interim steps that could have been there for you to actually speak to them about marketing promotions or merchandising.
The eTailer: How do you engage that shopper?
Shaffer: Having a [search solution] tool like Mercado's allows me to generate search results that not only give them back the product they're looking at but perhaps recommend three additional products or three best-sellers or even influence the ranking of the displayed results. I may want to put my three most popular products along the first row of results and have other things filter in by relevancy.
The eTailer: Will you also steer people toward the higher-margin merchandise?
Shaffer: Absolutely. Perhaps you mix in a higher margin, perhaps you mix in some new arrivals. The funny thing is, most people generate search results by best-sellers. A new arrival doesn't have a chance to become your best-seller if it's always going to be at the end of your search results.
Say someone is looking for a dining table. Most people's simple navigation on the left-hand side might take them to "dining room set." Then your next choice is "Do you want formal or informal?" And your next choice might be "Do you want metal, wood, or glass?" And the next choice might be "Do you want square or oval?" And the next choice might be "Do you want four, six, or eight chairs?"
What is the guy coming in and telling me? "I want a six-chair wooden round table." He can actually type that in my search box, and I can immediately generate the results he's looking for and save him seven clicks in a normal navigation tree.
The eTailer: What is the tipping point as far as how many clicks before shoppers get fed up?
Shaffer: We find on the average that people are willing to look at seven or eight pages. But the surgical shopper has a smaller threshold in terms of feeling like they're making progress on what they're looking for. And they're more in need of the information immediately; if they don't get it they will go to someone else who can better present information.