← Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
From Search to Sofa: Rethinking Discovery with Furniture.com | Reimagining Retail
00:28:37
Loading summary
Transcript71 lines
- [00:00]
A
On May 14 in New York City, eMarketers ad buyer strategy Summit brings senior media buyers and advertising strategists together for a full day of data driven insights, fresh forecasts and frank conversations about what's actually working and what's next. Check out the full agenda and grab your ticket now link in the show notes. Hi everyone. Today is Wednesday, May 13th. Welcome to eMarketer's weekly retail show, Reimagining Retail. This is the show where we talk about how retail collides with every part of our lives. And I'm your host, Suzy Deva Kenyon. On today's episode, we're breaking down one of the most frustrating shopping journeys in retail. The home category. It's massive, it's growing. And yet it still feels harder than it should. Because here the challenge isn't just the discovery piece, it's also the decision making. Joining me today for his first Reimagining Retail episode is principal analyst Yuri Wormser, joining me in our new studio. Hi, Yuri.
- [01:02]
B
Hey, Suzy. I'm so honored to be on this.
- [01:04]
A
I'm so happy to have you. And special Guest Dan Bennett, CMO of furniture.com. hey, Dan.
- [01:11]
C
Hi, team. Thanks for having me.
- [01:13]
A
Well, thanks for joining us. So before we get started, I thought we could do a very quick speed intro for you, Dan. In 30 seconds or less, tell us what you do in one sentence.
- [01:29]
C
Wow, what a great challenge for a verbose Englishman to try and get something done. In 30 seconds or less. In 30 seconds or less. Four years ago, three of us launched furniture.com and I spend every day and every week trying to build this business along with my partners to be the default furniture shopping destination.
- [01:49]
A
I love that. The default. We need it. I'm going to talk a lot about how I find this. This is a hard. I love shopping, but this one's a hard one for me. So I'm very excited. I love your site. Okay, my other question is, what is your favorite? Now you could pick one. Current book, podcast, TV show, movie.
- [02:10]
C
I can't pick one. I'm gonna give you a few. So we have lunch with our team most days out here on our big table in furniture.com New York. And I spend most of the time talking to him about stuff I'm into right now. And I'll give you two tips. My favorite podcast, I think the best podcast in the world outside of this one.
- [02:31]
A
Well played.
- [02:32]
C
Is the Rest is History, which is a British podcast all about history hosted by two British history professors. I know that doesn't sound like the most Compelling thing to listen to, but I promise you, it's. It's fascinating. And my favorite book of the last 12 months has been the Will of the Many series of which I've read two. There's a third one coming out soon which is kind of sci fi stuff. They're my two fave things right now.
- [03:00]
A
Wow. Yuri, do you know these?
- [03:02]
B
No, I don't.
- [03:04]
A
I do know the British show have youe Been Served? Do you know this one? Classic. I am Canadian after all.
- [03:13]
C
That's a throwback. Oh, my God, I love it.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, I could talk about this all day, but we got to start talking about furniture. So we know it's one of the biggest categories in retail and we're talking about hundreds of billion dollars a year. And more and more of that shopping is starting to happen online. But for many shoppers, it's still surprisingly complicated. Nearly every shopper, and I got this from you guys too, says that they feel overwhelmed by the number of options. Most feel stressed about making the right choice, whatever that is for them. And the average purchase take up to weeks sometimes with dozens of tabs open to just land on one item that they want to buy. So today we're just using the home category as a lens to understand where the shopping journey actually breaks down and what it really takes to help customers move from browsing to deciding. But before we dive in, I always start with another rapid fire question. Which is what is the last home item you bought or. Or you thought you wanted to buy but haven't pulled the trigger? Yuri, starting with you.
- [04:15]
B
It's so unsexy. I bought a shoe rack. That was the last home item I bought. Our old one was falling apart. It was a mess.
- [04:24]
A
Did you replace what you had or you bought something new? Completely different.
- [04:28]
B
We bought something completely different, bigger and better.
- [04:32]
A
Did you use any tools or you just magically new?
- [04:36]
B
I used a tool called my daughter to put it together, but she was. She found it, she bought it using my credit card and she put it together.
- [04:46]
A
So I love it. You sound very satisfied.
- [04:48]
B
Yeah, very satisfied. That's a big win. Yeah.
- [04:50]
A
Dan, what about you?
- [04:53]
C
You know, I think the humble shoe rack doesn't get the love it deserves. Our house would be a mess without appropriate shoe racks. So I like Yuri's response there. Mine was probably my office chair, which I have to tell you, I made a bad decision on it. It's not comfortable. You know what I did, Susie? I went cheap. And I think on an office chair, you just gotta grin and bear it and buy A decent one. So that was what it was. It was an office chair.
- [05:27]
A
I see some buyer's remorse there.
- [05:29]
C
Yeah, definitely. It might be finding its way to Facebook soon.
- [05:34]
A
It's funny, because I bought something for my kitchen, which I thought I measured the cupboards properly, but evidently I did not. And now, because the return policy was very complicated, it is just sitting in my living room waiting for someone to take it. But it's too little of an item to put on Marketplace. That just seems like too much effort. So if anybody needs a kitchen shelf organizer that is a little bit wider than most New York apartments, definitely let me know.
- [05:58]
C
Well, I mean, if it fits shoes on it, you could have let me know. And maybe, maybe there could have been a problem solved.
- [06:04]
A
Oh, yeah, I should repurpose it.
- [06:06]
B
Just four weeks too late for me.
- [06:07]
A
Oh, sorry. I wish I'd known. I should have complained about this instead of my table that I still haven't purchased. Okay, so, Dan, at a high level, what is furniture.com exactly? And what problem are you trying to solve?
- [06:20]
C
I mean, it depends on the day. Honestly, in terms of the last answer, the problem we're trying to solve, I think legitimately, is that there is a trust issue in the furniture category. And you said it beautifully in your introduction at the top of the show, that furniture is a giant category and growing, but it's a category I think that historically has been slow to adopt to the rate of change from a technology point of view. And it's because trust is typically quite low in this category. And what I mean by that is when you're purchasing perhaps anything other than a shoe rack, but if you're purchasing a sofa or a dining table, as we've discussed, you really need to trust the place you're buying it from. And when we first stood up this business, we did a lot of consumer research and understood that it was one of the categories that had some of the lowest trust scores in it. So what we're trying to do@furniture.com is build what we call the decision layer for furniture. Our feeling was, and still is, if we could bring together a multitude of furniture retailers that people already know and trust, and we could put them in one place with one simple checkout, one cart checkout, then we would start to move up that trust curve. There are plenty of large furniture retailers, I should say online furniture retailers out there. There's one big one in particular, but much of that product is drop shipped. It typically doesn't come from known brands. And we felt like if we could, like, I said, bring those brands together in one place with one cart, we could start to solve those problems. There are many other answers that compound on that as it relates to the technology we're using to do that, but perhaps we'll come to that later in the chat.
- [08:15]
A
It's interesting because you're using the word trust, and I mean, we've been talking a lot about trust in an era of AI especially. But it's also confidence, right? It's like such a big purchase, and you kind of almost feel like you're stuck with it if you make the wrong decision, except for if it's something that you can sort of repurpose on Marketplace.
- [08:36]
C
Yeah, that's totally right. I mean, so, funnily enough, we did a keynote, a couple, as we know, because we saw you there at Etail, and our keynote was really around the premise of confidence and the ability for a digital experience to imbue confidence. Our angle on that was that we have built an AI that will happily small talk with you around what you need to solve for. But confidence is key, for sure, and
- [09:03]
A
within the realm of what you guys are doing. It's like you're helping me get to the decision faster with more confidence without necessarily putting. Pushing a specific brand or retailer. It's much more about, like you said, folks are not always brand. It's more brand agnostic. I'd say the home store.
- [09:20]
C
That's right, it is. You know, funnily enough, within furniture, there are. There are some brands that stand out here. If I. If I'm gonna go and buy a. Maybe a shoe rack, but if I'm gonna go and buy something that I need quickly, I don't want to spend a ton of money on it. You know, there are brands like IKEA that have that big, powerful, beautiful brand and do an amazing job of that. But much of the time, people actually don't shop by brand. They shop by attribute. They need a certain size sofa and a certain fabric, and that's typically how they'll search. The brand piece will underpin a purchase. Like if you, you know, if you see a, you know, Bloomingdale is one of our partners, I'm probably more likely to trust a Bloomingdale's checkout than I might be brand X that's being dropshipped from somewhere overseas I don't know about. So, you know, getting back to your confidence point, I think that all sort of lends itself to that. You also hit on something which is doing my job for me here. But the shopping journey is extremely Convoluted in furniture as well. And, you know, the average hour is something like 9 hours and 13 tabs used just to find a solution to a furniture problem. And we felt like in this day and age, that was, you know, absolutely ridiculous. There are multiple ways of solving that, and we're actively building against trying to truncate that experience well also, I mean,
- [10:44]
A
we have touched on all these points, but it is a very complex category in that there's many big, big ticket items, lots of decorative items, lots of things in between. But people don't shop it very often either. So that adds to that level of complexity. And I know not every listener comes to us from a category that is this complex, but there are certainly some key learnings, like how do you remove friction? And you guys have done that very easily.
- [11:12]
C
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad to see. I like that you think it feels easy. The back end of it's relatively difficult. It's an extremely complicated category for a few reasons. It probably carries with it friction points that exist in other categories, but we're lucky enough to have them all existing in one. So it's expensive in many cases. It's usually for many people, it's the third most expensive thing they'll buy behind a house and a car, you know, larger furniture that is, it's very emotional, it's very visual, it's very personal. It's a low frequency purchase, as you mentioned. So people don't have the muscle memory necessarily. They're not typically experts. And again, that's where that decision layer becomes so important. It's why we've built from the very beginning of the development of our tool, we utilize machine learning. You go back four years to synthesize all of our feeds, our retailer feeds, so that by time they end up on furniture.com, they all look equally beautiful. They're all presented in the same way. So we built a tool to help us do that behind the scenes. And then we were able to, on top of that, build what we call Dottie. Dottie is our, you know, AI helper, if you will, sort of furniture Sherpa, but utilizing Dottie, you know, a furniture shopper can cede some of that expertise to furniture.com and we will help them make those decisions. So you probably know this from some of your past shows, but a Google search was typically three or four words. An AI prompt is often north of 23 or 24 words. What that means for us is that somebody can come in, simply prompt Dottie in as long form as they want. And we will synthesize that information and present back what we think are the right solutions for that particular furniture challenge. Now, you might need to prompt her a couple other times as it relates to getting color or texture or whatever, but we felt like that was a shortcut to making people feel confident in their decisions.
- [13:26]
A
Well, especially when we think about the endless aisle. I know, Yuri. We talk a lot about this. Sometimes too much choice isn't helpful either. And that comes across in a lot of different categories as well. What is that defining balance between choice that is optimal. So people feel like it matches their style or. Or their emotional connection versus so much choice. Like my dining room table situation where I just haven't made a purchase yet.
- [13:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'm really curious to hear what Dan says about this, because he's actually seeing. He has a lot of empirical data that shows what's working, what isn't. But in general, the higher the consideration, the more people want to shop, the more they're willing to go through a lot of choices. Now, that doesn't mean they want. They don't. They want choices that are broad and not related to what they're looking for. So that's what makes something like Dottie really useful. You get a lot of choice, but it's already within a realm where they all could be possibilities. Now, if it's low consideration, then I think you're. You're less willing to go through a ton of stuff. You're more looking for what works and what's the best price. But I think that what a lot of people forget about high consideration versus low consideration. With high consideration, people actually like shopping a lot. They don't mind going through a lot of things, whereas with low consideration, they just want to get.
- [14:53]
A
Get it done.
- [14:54]
B
Get it done. Yep.
- [14:55]
C
Yeah, I would echo that. I think that one of the things we talk about furniture.com is, and I personally think shopping for furniture should have a bit of joy in it. Right. You're shopping for something that is expensive and meaningful, and it's going to be with you for a long time, and it should have a little bit of joy mixed in. And that's been largely scrubbed from the experience. And we're looking for ways to add that back. In the other thing, I think that's important Even within a high consideration category, like shopping is, at a certain point, people get a sense of what they like. I've done my research. I've watched the YouTube videos, and I followed these influencers. I think I know what I Like, and then pretty quickly they start to ask questions around, is it going to fit? Is it worth the money? Is there a better version somewhere else? Can I again, can I trust the retailer? Am I making a mistake? You know, I've got to live with this mistake, Suzy, as you said earlier. So what we're, you know, what we're very aware of in how we think about structuring our UX and our design, our product design is going back to inspiring confidence and reducing overwhelm. If we can do those two things and if Dottie can help you do that, rather than saying, here are 10,000 sofas that match, saying, you know, here are eight to 10 that we think fit what you're looking for, I think that's a better experience.
- [16:24]
A
Right. Like you, there is this tension. Right. Because if I want a blue couch and you're not showing me a blue couch, then I'm going to walk away. But if you're showing me, like you were saying, you're every other color couch, as then it's overwhelming and it's very fragmented and it's hard to make a decision. So you walk away and then hopefully you come back. What I think is cool about your site is that not only are you curating so that I don't have to deal with this tension, but you're also looking at couches across many different brands so that I can pick something from Bloomingdale's that matches something from whoever else, Macy's and it's fine. Versus my going to all the different websites to put a room together.
- [17:05]
C
That's right. The latter point you make there is the biggest pain in the bum. We've all been there. You have eight tabs open because one sofa fits from here and you think one table fits from there. And then you've got to navigate the individual checkouts. Yeah, we wanted to put it together, let you compare and contrast and build a cart and get on with your day, kind of.
- [17:28]
A
So with all of that, are you seeing numbers that are also showing that you're minimizing returns for the retailers?
- [17:35]
C
Yeah, we do. I think what we've seen from the early instances. So we launched this version of the website back in at the end of February. So we built the first version of furniture.com. well, furniture.com has had multiple lives before we stood this new business up on it. Our version of it was originally a more aggregator like experience. It was still underpinned by a lot of the tools we use today, but it was fundamentally aggregating traffic for our retailers. We have since pivoted that we learned pretty quickly that shoppers actually want to check out in one place as well. So we added the checkout piece. So you can now check out furniture.com and that launched in February. And we have seen dramatic reduction in returns. There is a return process you probably are not surprised to hear. And usually people will get a piece, they'll spend a little bit of time with it, decide whether it's right or wrong. So that can be a cycle. But we're long enough into the new site now that we've seen that we have had some accretive impact on lower returns.
- [18:43]
A
That's great. So you're making the life of the retailer and the consumer easier.
- [18:47]
C
I hope so. Yeah.
- [18:48]
A
Speaking of making easier, I mean, there's a lot of innovation happening right now on an AR VR sort of lens. And it's the shiny penny that's still shiny right now. I would say when it comes to visual search, conversational AI, there's a lot happening. Does this help the journey, you guys, or is it just overhyped?
- [19:09]
B
I definitely think it helps the journey. You know, the first company that I thought had a, had a pretty good AR experience was Ikea about a decade ago, more than a decade ago, and, and what they found back then, and that was an incredibly early version, was that it helped increase consumer confidence in an online purchase and also decrease returns. And since then you've had all types of these AR tools in brands, in Snap, in Google Ads, and they've all shown the same thing, higher conversion rates and lower returns. Dan, I know you guys have something along those lines. How has it worked for you?
- [19:55]
C
It's funny because what I thought would be the case has sort of ended up being the inverse a little. The IKEA reference is a really great one because that is now a decade or so old, which is wild. What we felt coming into this was that we would build these room building tools and AR and VR back when Meta was in the process of crushing its stock value by moving into the Metaverse. And I think what we've seen with the fairly dramatic evolution of AI as it sort of marches towards general AI, is that the ability to talk semantically, especially with furniture. And as Yuri mentioned earlier, people don't mind spending the time to do the work here. But people don't talk like furniture salespeople. Right? They talk like human beings. And they're not going to Talk about a 92 inch performance fabric with kiln dried wood. They're going to talk about, I need a Durable sofa for a small apartment with a dog. And so if we can, you know, we deliberately built tools that would allow people to think about that natural language interface, which I think is the first barrier, so that they don't feel uncomfortable because they might not know some of the right language around furniture. And I think that's proven to be way more valuable than the visual piece, at least at this point. We do have a new tool, a new product coming online at the end of next week, which is Visual Search. That's not necessarily that new, but I think it's important. People don't often know how to describe what they're looking for, but they saw a picture of it or they took a picture of it. That's an easy way to do it. I think it all boils down to what can we deliver that removes friction? What can we deliver that helps them feel like their judgment is valuable? Uh, and then, you know, what, what can we deliver that makes them feel confident again?
- [21:56]
A
Yeah, it's the removing any friction to head off the buyer's remorse.
- [22:02]
C
And there's a lot of friction in furniture. Susie.
- [22:05]
A
Yeah, I also think I bought my kitchen thing, which was under $50, so I don't feel super invested in it while I was home from an. A website that does have an AR VR tool, but I didn't probably should have walk over to my kitchen and like zap the thing to make sure it was going to fit, which I didn't do. So it brings me to this idea around mobile. We talk about mobile all the time and bridging the gap between online and physical. It plays a huge role in the shopping journey, but not every category leans into it. How should retailers really be thinking about mobile in these high consideration sets that are low frequency as well?
- [22:44]
B
Generally, the higher the frequency a purchase and the more people want to research, especially visually, it, it shifts, it skews a little bit more towards PC than mobile. You see that in travel, you see it in auto. I'd imagine you, you see it in furniture as well. But that doesn't mean that mobile is still not the center of a lot of what they're doing. It can be, it can be these conversational tools that could work while you're thinking about it, go back and forth in that way. It could be the visual se, it could be the try on end of room. Those things work obviously only on mobile, but when you're talking about skewing in one way or another, these categories do skew a little bit towards PC from mobile.
- [23:39]
A
I think probably for me, furniture and home decor in general, it's probably mobile. When it comes to being inspired. You see something on Instagram, maybe you screenshot it, and then you upload it to the website to see or like, I didn't think about, but I will when I go home home, take a picture of my couch to see if it'll give me something matching from a dining room table and try this new angle and see if that'll help. So mobile has a place, but probably not for the actual conversion part.
- [24:07]
C
So what we're seeing from our point of view is about 80% of our traffic is actually mobile. And that's not to say that 80% of our checkouts are mobile. Those two things are. Are different. What, what I think we're experiencing is that mobile is an assist. It's an ability. You know, it's often used. It's reusable very widely for research. It's a second screen experience. In some cases, it might be used to upload imagery. It might be used to. It's more easy to dictate to as it relates to interacting with something like a dottie. I think there's also still natural movement back to desktop to see a larger image perhaps of something or to feel more. Perhaps more in control of that moment when you're going to click buy. But I do think one of the things we're seeing from our audience, and we have a. For the furniture category. Furniture category is quite broad as it relates to audience age. Obviously, we see a slightly younger audience starting to become part of our ecosystem, and I think that's driving a lot of the mobile experience for us. We don't have an app, for example, yet, so we probably will have an app by the end of the year for furniture dot com. We haven't seen that. There hasn't been a native need for it yet. You can save your favorites, you can share with friends, family, roommates, et cetera, from a general mobile experience. So we haven't done that yet. But I do think it will change. I think over time, we're going to see more and more people feeling comfortable clicking buy on a mobile screen.
- [25:52]
B
Yeah. One of the things we've seen also is just that generational divide that people are willing to do the whole consumer journey on mobile if they're Gen Z or Millennial. And as millennials are becoming kind of the core of furniture buying, I could see that really shifting the way people behave.
- [26:10]
A
Also, a very good distinction that we often forget to make out loud is that there's a difference between a mobile experience and an app. And not everybody needs to have an app if there's no core reason for existing.
- [26:21]
C
I firmly agree with that. I think increasingly that's the case.
- [26:25]
A
Okay, so lots of discussion for those listening that are outside of the home category, what's one lesson, just one from each of you, that folks should take back to their office to. To make their customer journey a little bit better? Yuri, I'm going to start with you.
- [26:43]
B
Listen to what the customers are saying and deliver to the products the options that respect what they're looking for. And that I think really involves conversational search. I think that's a key to getting exactly what they want.
- [26:58]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's a great answer. The truth for us has been building a standardized data set such that we can then build really intuitive tools and AI products on top of it, like our, as Yuri mentioned, our semantic search tool. Without mature, solid data, that just becomes a real pickle really quickly. But when you've got it in, we have 3 million SKUs on the site. So if we hadn't found a way to standardize that, and what I mean by that, just for your audience sake, real quick, is that the way Bloomingdale's 1 Kings Lane and Serena and Lily or Lulu and Georgia might talk about? Modern is different. Right. We had to find a way to standardize all those things. So when you look for modern, when you look for a certain fabric, a certain color, et cetera, it's all the same. And then on top of that, we can build the tools that make finding it that much easier. So I think do the technical piece first. Get the heavy lifting out the way, and then you can create some magic on top of that.
- [28:02]
A
We could definitely keep going on this, but unfortunately that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, Dan.
- [28:07]
C
Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [28:09]
A
And thank you, Yuri.
- [28:11]
B
Thanks, Susie. Glad to be here.
- [28:12]
A
And thanks to our listeners and to our team that edits the podcast. Please leave a rating or review and remember to subscribe. I'll see you for more reimagining retail next Wednesday. And on Friday, join Marcus for another episode of behind the Numbers. Guys, are you so excited?
- [28:34]
C
We are.
- [28:35]
A
Good. Thank you for that.