Home Gallery Stores

Revenue grew by 3x in 14 months...

Ecommerce
B2C
Medium

BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

Home Gallery Stores is a family-owned and operated furniture retailer that was first established in Goldsboro, NC back in 1913. With over 107 years of operation, this brand is not just one of the oldest furniture retailers in the US, but it has grown to become one of the largest.
Ever since focusing on being a digital-first store, Home Gallery Stores drove a ton of traffic to its website using paid channels and SEO. Despite all the effort to try and increase their conversion rate, for some reason, their sales remained stunted.

Challenges:

  • Coordinating three different teams, and making sure that they were on the same page at all times.
  • Traffic was only paid however acquisition costs were too high.
  • The team wanted to improve product page designs and make it more intuitive and persuasive
  • Both the internal and external developers had no experimentation background.

THE CHALLENGE

Home Gallery Stores hired Invesp after having struggled to improve their sales using paid channels. At the time of bringing in Invesp, Home Gallery Stores’ marketing and development teams had no experimentation background.

Their internal development team spent much time maintaining and upgrading their existing programs – all this propelled the Home Gallery Stores’ executive to involve an external development company.

Working with three different teams on the same project can be challenging at times. Despite all teams having different experimentation backgrounds, we had to align all three groups to ensure everything flows with no distinct lines.

Fortunately, the Home Gallery Stores’ website had no usability issues. But that didn’t make the task at hand easier. We had to think about persuasion and ways to differentiate a brand that was, somehow, drowning in a sea of sameness in the retail world.

When we started working with Home Gallery Stores, people were not yet used to the idea of buying furniture online. So, convincing them to purchase high-value items (which is above $2000) was always going to be an uphill task.

Solutions:

  • Comprehensive conversion audit to identify and prioritize conversion issues on the site.
  • Comprehensive user behavioral research to understand user motivations on the site.
  • Comprehensive data analysis and analytics configuration to track users’ activity on the site.
  • Identify and run experiments on different parts of the site to improve conversion rates and average order value.
  • Design, develop, and run AB experiments so as to improve conversions both on mobile and desktop.
  • Track and report results on a weekly basis to the team.

THE SOLUTION

We deployed a team consisting of a strategist lead, Senior CRO Specialist, Senior UX Designer, senior front-end developer, and an Analytics Specialist.

Although we employed our SHIP optimization process on this particular project, we didn’t do the JTBD interviews. Instead, our team used a combination of user research, expert review, usability tests, and data analysis.

Within the first month of intense research and analysis, the team had created a humongous list of conversion bottlenecks and persuasion opportunities on the Home Gallery Stores website.

The team ranked the issues using our prioritization framework to determine which topics will most impact the bottom line while requiring the least effort.

One of the first tests we launched was to stop the bleeding on product pages. We discovered that the product page designs were not intuitive, causing the funnel to leak more revenue.

The team resolved this by creating a new compelling product page design and tested it against the original version. This was an early quick win that produced an uplift in the overall conversion rate of the site.

We continued testing, employing different persuasion and psychological techniques on various features and pages every month to figure out an optimization treatment that would work best for the site.

Our team conducted weekly status meetings to keep the Impact Home Gallery Stores team updated about the status of the different experiments, discuss new testing plans, and receive feedback on the current work.

THE RESULTS

THE RESULTS

Our CRO team had wanted to give shoppers the smoothest journey to checkout and this meant redesigning the product pages.

This conversion opportunity was identified after conducting an expert review on the site – and it helped increase conversion rate, from product pages to order confirmation page, by almost 300%.

The site’s monthly revenue grew from $500k to 1.5 million in 14 months.