People's interest in furniture and home decor grew when they had to spend all of their time at home. The pandemic really turned the tables, quite literally, when it suddenly boost up furniture sales and forced home decor retailers to amp up their game.
With more and more people wanting to make their home arrangements more livable and work-friendly during the pandemic, most home decor brands had to create a digital storefront and become home decor e-tailers to truly profit from the situation.
But as Home Decor e-Commerce grew, so did the competition and the need to get in tune with the online shopping sphere.
In this article, we will be talking about the top e-Commerce solutions that every home decor and online furniture brand can benefit from.
Let us dive in.
What are some common challenges faced by Home Decor e-Commerce brands?
We cannot talk about solutions if we cannot pinpoint the problems, to begin with. Here are 4 of the biggest challenges faced by Home Decor businesses online.
1.Constraints in assessing product quality
Unlike physical stores, it can be difficult to properly showcase your product's quality on a digital storefront. In such cases, it becomes imperative to educate online shoppers about your product's quality in a detailed manner. The challenges extend to the need of addressing the consumers' concerns on a deeper, emotional level to recreate the experience felt in a proper brick-and-mortar store.
2.Shopping online for Home Decor feels impersonal
Shopping for home decor and furniture has always been a personal experience in a physical store, and that is exactly what shoppers still expect from their online shopping experience. It is necessary to make your customers feel that their needs and preferences are understood.
Yet many eCommerce platforms fail to execute this personalisation, leading to the loss of many potential loyal customers.
3.Returns from dissatisfied customers
Shipping furniture is a delicate business and many online businesses struggle with its logistics and scaling. But the one thing more troublesome than the original shipments are the returns. Returns are especially expensive and inconvenient for home decor e-stores, and leave the customer with disappointment and a bad impression of your brand.
4.Understanding what the shopper is looking for
It is hard to understand what buyers really want, especially with so many users actively using apps like Pinterest to engage with home content on the social image-sharing app. Hope decor shopping is an extremely visual experience and requires a highly personalised experience that can be hard to provide in an e-Commerce setup.
Then how does a home decor brand stand out in this crowded online market?
A brand can only truly stand out in an online market by showcasing its purposefulness and unique style. It is critical for businesses to stand out in an online setting, along with having the solutions required to complete the challenges mentioned above. Having a full-fledged eCommerce website helps build trust with potential customers.
Know what you specialise in; why should your customers buy from you? What is it that you bring to the table? What does it look like, and how will it satisfy your consumers?
Answering those questions and creating your own style are two extremely important aspects of starting not just an eCommerce but any furniture or home decor company.
What are some e-Commerce marketing solutions for home decor brands?
We have already established that owning a furniture business and doing eCommerce marketing for home decor can be really hard.
Here are some solutions to help you grow your digital storefront:
1. Set up social media
Social media is a very important part of eCommerce. Once you've set up your e-store, it is important to actively put yourself and your brand wherever your customers are.
Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are some of the best social media platforms to market your furniture and home decor products. You can also sell your products and directly interact with and engage customers on such platforms, making them additional marketing and sales channels for your brand.
Remember that home decor is a visual market and if you tap into the right aesthetics on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, you can sell anything.
2. Instil SEOs
SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of improving a website to increase its visibility online in order to bring organic traffic to your site when people search for products and services related to your business.
By targeting the right keywords to optimise your landing pages, product pages, product descriptions and images, you can get your e-store to rank in organic searches and bring high-intent leads along with increased traffic to your home decor website and store.
3. Use high-quality visuals
We have already established that furniture and home decor shopping is a visual experience. It is imperative for eCommerce websites to heighten the quality of their images and videos to even come close to the real deal. Hire a photographer or invest in a good camera to do justice to your products and their visual representation online. Remember that presentation is one of the main factors that impact the perception of your brand in the customer's mind. Optimise your logo and other designs, as well as your colour choices, to fit seamlessly with your products.
4. Explore augmented reality
Customers want to see what your product would look like in their homes. Entice them with augmented reality tools by letting them experience a virtual 3D model of the products they love in their space to understand how it may fit. It is by far the best way to "try" furniture before buying.
The IKEA Place iOS app, along with Amazon, are the perfect examples of this. They let consumers "virtually" place furniture in their homes to see if it's the right fit. Studies also show that 66% of users are keen to experience AR as part of their digital shopping experience.
5. Employ chatbots
Conversational AI chatbots are the new buzz right now, and there is a very straightforward reason why. They get the work done.
Use Chatbots to improve the quality and quantity of your lead generation and customer engagement on all your channels. Add a chat widget to your website and deploy chatbots on all your social media platforms to better understand your customers, answer all their queries instantly and never leave a user interacting with your brand hanging for anything at all. Engati is an automation solutions platform that can provide your e-commerce brand with intelligent chatbots for almost all channels ranging from your website, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and many others.
Install a chatbot to provide a personalised customer experience for every user at all times.
6. Post customer testimonials
Reach out to your existing customers and ask them for reviews and feedback. Ask them to share their experience along with images of how your product fits into their homes. There is nothing better than customer testimonials when it comes to building trust among users for your eCommerce brand. It also helps customers feel like they aren't alone in liking a particular brand or product, which increases the possibilities of sale.
Make sure to add customer reviews on all your product pages for better results considering all the leading home decor websites have it.
7. Allow customisation
eCommerce customers expect personalised engagement beyond the first name basis. They want their products to have customisation options to best suit their place and preferences. Give your customers the ability to pick their preferred colour, size, material and finish with a simple product configuration feature and win them over in just a few clicks.
8. Invest in quality product description and categorisation
Featuring high-quality Images and videos are must but they are still incomplete without a good product description. It is important not to underestimate the power of words, especially when they fragment and detail content.
Write good product descriptions that stand out while clearly mentioning the colour, material, style and dimensions of the item. Also, provide an equally detailed product categorisation for your website. Carefully plan and decide your categories based on your products, their shape and purpose, your target audience, their needs, ease in user experience and overall convenience. This will help users find their product faster and more easily and, in turn, increase the chances of your sales.
9. Provide access to an expert.
No matter how detailed your website may be, you cannot complete a personalised shopping experience without giving your customers the opportunity to connect and consult with a live agent or an expert. By adding this option, you can allow your users the chance to speak to somebody who knows the product in and out and can sell. Your human experts can be available to attend to customers to increase customer satisfaction and complete all spears of engagement.
Smart chatbots like Engati's NLP based multilingual conversational chatbots are intelligent enough to seamlessly provide customers to speak with a live agent as and when required in a situation. You can also add the talk to an expert pop-up or window on your website to increase the interactiveness of your brand.
10. Educate with insightful content
Let your customers see that you know what you're doing. Add insightful content to your website like blogs, glossaries, user-generated videos, styling videos and much more. Include your own customers and hire/ collaborate with online influencers in your media content to produce helpful and attractive content. Write blogs on different trends and interesting topics like feng shui, Vastu, designs, etc and curate newsletters to educate your customers about your industry and brand.
11. Provide easy Finance options
Offering "buy now, pay later" options for your eCommerce home decor brand can be a great way to provide greater flexibility and convenience for your customers, encouraging them to make larger purchases and potentially increasing their loyalty to your brand. It can also help to attract new customers who may have previously been hesitant to make a purchase due to financial constraints.
There are a lot more automation solutions that can be used to grow and scale your home decor eCommerce store.
Register with engati to grow with automation by your side.
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