The Way Customers Engage at Wayfair Drives Brand Loyalty

Wafair brand loyatly Wayfair, a U.S.-based ecommerce company that sells furniture, luggage, toys, and pet items, owes much of its considerable success to the ways its customers interact with its site, which drives brand loyalty.

Total net revenue for the first quarter was $424.4 million, a whopping 52.3% increase compared to the same quarter in 2014. The company’s five home brands include Wayfair.com, Joss & Main, All Modern, Birch Lane, and DwellStudio

“The way the consumer engages and interacts with our site is critical to getting both that initial purchase in helping to drive loyalty,” Steve Conine, Co-Chairman, CTO, and Co-Founder of Wayfair said during the company’s May 11 first-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “We believe our site experience custom-built for the unique needs of the furniture and décor market is a key differentiator for Wayfair. There are hundreds of people at Wayfair from engineers to designers to merchants to data analyst who work every day on refining the Wayfair shopping experience.”

For example, Conine said Wayfair.com’s site and product team comprised of more than 200 merchandisers, designers, editors, engineers, product managers, and business analysts, tracks customer behavior throughout their shopping experience to understand where and how a specific customer engaged with the site and products.

“The teams use both technology enabled and hand-curated design elements to help improve customer engagement,” Conine said. “With over seven million different items, we likely have what a customer is looking for. But her search criteria can’t easily be typed into a search bar. For example, bathroom vanity for small bathroom is highly subjective. Our site merchandisers aim to help you find that perfect end table, decorative pillow or tabletop accent in the most engaging, exciting and efficient way possible.”

Wayfair’s new category landing pages help the customer truly discover the right product by combining proprietary imagery from its photo studios, helpful content and buying guides created by its editors, trend forecasting from its merchants, and enhanced navigation and discovery from its engineers. The result is a 25% to 35% reduction in exit rates on a revised landing pages in Q1 2015 compared to the same period a year ago.

In the past nine months, the site merchandising team has updated more than 600 of these pages.

“We expect to see continued improvement as we roll out this initiative across our family of brands,” Conine said.

Wayfair CEO, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder Niraj Shah is ecstatic about the future.

When we started Wayfair 13 years ago, people didn’t think that customers could get comfortable buying furniture and décor online,” he explained. “But over the past decade, as consumers have acclimated to purchasing a wide range of products online, the advantages to the online shopping experience have become apparent. That is to say, vast selection, inspiring merchandising, and attractive prices, all from the convenience of one’s home. We have seen growing consumer comfort with purchasing furniture and decor online.”

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