How do designers buy furniture today? Sure, brick-and-mortar stores offer in-person appeal, and some purchase orders are still placed at trade shows. But for 24-7 sales and brand saturation, an e-commerce site is the essential resource. And when it comes to driving conversions, a pretty Instagram feed or wallpapery homepage just won’t cut it: Home goods brands need a robust interactive domain with tons of native features supported by an intuitive content management system built to scale with your business. BigCommerce, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that combines a user-friendly interface with endless customization options, is the hosting platform of choice for companies as diverse as Coco Republic, Duxiana, Houzer and Wovenbyrd. In addition to its foolproof functionality, they depend on BigCommerce for the targeted data it generates. Providing invaluable insights about trending product categories, inventory status, customer demographics and more, its analytics empower brands to respond to market demands in real time. It’s why Brendan McCarthy, owner and managing director of Designerie, chose BigCommerce for his brand. That decision delivered a 26 percent increase in revenue and 88 percent boost to average order value, and it doubled the number of customers on the site.
“B2B e-commerce is about creating connections and facilitating as much of a brick-and-mortar or trade-show experience as possible via your website; breaking down the barriers that historically have caused inefficiencies or challenges in the purchase funnel for the trade community and retail partners,” says McCarthy, speaking from the Minneapolis-area headquarters of Designerie, an umbrella company that is the exclusive U.S. importer and distributor of a curated portfolio of boutique European furniture brands. “BigCommerce provides a consumer-like experience for our B2B customer.”
For McCarthy, that experience meant an upgrade from the basic price listings of his former host to a full lifestyle presentation for every item Designerie sells, including photography, descriptive text, customization options and product specifications. The sophisticated customer interface is buttressed by a flexible backend for him, his front-office team of 10, and the independent reps who sell the lines across the country. “All of them are interacting with our BigCommerce site on a daily basis,” he says.
“It’s a very scalable and highly customizable platform,” McCarthy continues. “If I think of a new feature that will be relevant to Designerie’s customers, we can work with BigCommerce to program the concept and roll it out soon thereafter.” Because, for example, customers in the contract hospitality sector now want direct access to AutoCAD, SketchUp and Revit files for their client presentations, Designerie is collaborating with BigCommerce to build them into each product page—sparing users the extra steps of digitally rummaging through a central asset bank to find them. “BigCommerce makes it easy to evolve the product page template instead,” he says.
AN APPETITE FOR APPS
To further the platform’s functionality, BigCommerce also readily accommodates third-party add-ons. “We’re continuously integrating applications,” McCarthy notes. Primary among those is site search, which enables faceted navigation. “A designer looking for dining room chairs may be focused on specific attributes—for example, a white, stackable, outdoor style,” he says. Instead of having to manually parse product criteria one screen at a time, designers can rapidly select and filter their search results, fine-tuning details down to color variation. “Each brand has its own unique names for its colorways and other characteristics, but the designer shouldn’t have to read through 30 different words for white,” he continues. “It was a big data exercise to take all of these brand-specific hues, from dove white to dune white to off-white, and standardize them.” But in the year since BigCommerce incorporated the function into Designerie’s site, “customers have raved about it,” says McCarthy.
Another MVP app is HubSpot: customer management software for tasks like email marketing and tracking sales. “It provides a window into who is accessing the site, what products they’re looking at and what’s trending,” says McCarthy. He finds that information particularly useful in the hospitality space, where the average buy cycle starts with a designer or architect, perhaps located in New York, selecting furniture for a hotel property in, say, the Caribbean. Upon client approval of the styles, the bulk sale then moves to the purchasing group in charge of buying for the entire hotel chain. “We’re able to follow this project journey, with both the designer or architect and the purchasing group, adjusting our quotes to each,” he says. “That connection between BigCommerce and HubSpot gives Designerie’s sales team a lot more insight to help nurture and then close those larger hospitality sales.” HubSpot is also the app behind one of the site’s biggest time-savers: the automation of trade account applications for new contacts from previously approved firms. “Based on the company or domain name, we can immediately cross-check if we already have an account with them, greenlight the new applicant, and turn on trade pricing for them in a matter of minutes,” says McCarthy.
BigCommerce’s product information management app—commonly abbreviated to PIM—also earns a gold star for expanding the capabilities of Designerie’s site. “It’s a centralized repository where we manage all of our product content specifications, imagery and video assets, allowing us to update them on the fly and publish them to the B2B domain as well as third-party websites we work with on the retail side,” McCarthy explains. If there’s an error, for example, in an item’s dimensions, once it’s fixed in the PIM, that correction is instantaneously made to online product pages, downloadable spec sheets, partner sites and so on.
AT YOUR SERVICE
With asset management effectively handled, asset creation is next on McCarthy’s e-commerce wish list. “As we expand our upholstery offerings, it’s demanding to photograph the exact same furniture frame in 30 different fabrics. With BigCommerce, we’re exploring ways to render all the options automatically,” he says. The platform is investigating how to make fabric swatches and wood samples available via product pages as well, eliminating the need for the customer to submit a query and wait for a reply or (worse) navigate away from the site altogether to check whether Designerie is on Material Bank, making the request there instead. “Direct-to-consumer companies have offered samples for a few years now, and B2B brands are realizing how important it can be,” says McCarthy. As a bonus, tracking samples can also inform sales forecasts by providing clues to trending colors and materials—but supporting the consumer is the priority.
While advancements in AI continue to be buzzworthy across all industries, and BigCommerce can seamlessly build in such functions, Designerie is taking a slow and steady approach to adopting them. “Perfecting the browsing experience and product presentation takes priority over AI accessories like chatbots,” McCarthy says. “We’re still much more high average order value, low transaction volume with our trade customers, and we like that human connection. We want every touch point, every message, to originate from the customer’s internal account team,” he adds. For each customer service request, HubSpot creates a ticket. “Is it a stock status question? Is it: ‘Where’s my order?’ Is it a damaged item claim?” Depending, the query is routed to the corresponding team—contract and hospitality, residential or retail—a targeted approach enabling Designerie to respond in a more personal way that reflects its value for the relationship. “Given the functionality that BigCommerce offers, we can tailor the site experience to specific customer segments and pricing tiers, yielding the greatest benefit to us and to them.”
DATA FOR DAYS
To educate brands on their customers, BigCommerce regularly culls user data into reports. “These analytics give us actionable insights into who is using the site and how,” says McCarthy. The keywords driving searches from one month to the next; the products with the highest page views in the past two weeks relative to the previous quarter; the most popular fabric colors; the geographical location of visitors: Such information can identify rising trends and burgeoning customer bases.
“Is there a surge in traffic from the Northeast following a trade show? Maybe we need to develop a new cushion based on the questions being asked via our online forms. Or considering the number of requests for quotes, we might want to add a fabric we launched at Salone to our stock program,” McCarthy cites as examples. Reviewed alongside analytics for not just confirmed sales but also “Add to Cart” and “Add to Quote” designations, the data helps Designerie determine its imports, manage its inventory and build out its revenue projections. “It makes us smarter about what assortment to stock and allows us to react a lot faster to customers’ interests,” he says. “That type of data you just can’t get offline.”
A UNIVERSAL BACKEND
McCarthy also oversees U.S. distribution for Sika Design, a high-end Danish furniture company that mainly serves the contract hospitality sector—its success is what prompted the founding of Designerie, because so many other European brands expressed interest in stateside representation. Today, the two separate brands share the same backend. “BigCommerce powers both websites, consolidating many duplicate operations,” he says.
It’s an approach McCarthy recommends for larger corporations positioning multiple brands in the market. “Oftentimes the ability to create unique experiences for several sister brands is limited by the cost and technical demands of managing all these different websites separately—making sure product is current, pricing is current, and customers have frictionless transactions,” he says. BigCommerce’s unified backend simplifies a complex situation, empowering the parent business to cohesively service customers who, on any given day, might be buying from brand A and brand C, but not brand B.
CONFIDENT E-COMMERCE
Whether you’re managing a diverse roster of to-the-trade home furnishing brands or starting up a single product line, McCarthy believes BigCommerce’s 26 percent boost to Designerie’s bottom line and 100 percent increase in customers prove the platform’s impact will translate to other businesses. “Our BigCommerce-hosted site ends up creating quasi–brand ambassadors within our trade community because it’s so user-friendly,” he says. For customers who first encounter Designerie’s furniture collections at a trade show, the platform replicates that initial interaction with a beautiful online presentation, plus all the product details, trade pricing and order forms needed to complete a purchase. For customers buying a high-ticket item sight unseen and possibly in bulk—like that hotel client in the Caribbean considering the specifications of a long-distance designer—the quality of the product pages and ease of the transaction is doubly important. “Everything the platform offers is aimed toward encouraging engagement and increasing conversion rates,” says McCarthy. Providing visual asset management, predictive sales analysis, seamless order processing and more, “our BigCommerce experience inspires confidence in our customers.”
This story is a paid promotion and was created in partnership with BigCommerce.
Homepage image: B2B e-commerce furniture brands Designerie and Sika Design serve the trade across all sectors: residential, commercial and hospitality | Courtesy of Designerie
