| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JULY 26, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
| ||||||||
 | ||||||||
| BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- COVER STORY
Furniture.com: Turning Visitors into Buyers Andrew Brooks, president and CEO of Furniture.com Inc., wants his customers to feel pampered--as if they'd just nestled onto one of the plum-colored velvet slipcovers he's selling. That's why two-year-old Furniture.com overhauled its service in January, adding software and computing power so the company can collect more telling information on its customers. Brooks is betting this will lead to products and personalized services that convince his clientele to snap up everything from Shaker tables to Frank Lloyd Wright lamps. It has been a pretty good bet. For starters, after analyzing Web surfers' behavior on his site, Brooks found that a high number of visitors were interested in sofas costing $700 to $1,100. The problem was, they decided not to buy when they clicked over and learned that delivery would take up to 12 weeks. So the company persuaded a designer to come up with new couches, available in July, that can be delivered within three weeks of an order. Staying attuned to customers hasn't stopped there. The Framingham (Mass.) startup now offers a service called My Selections, which lets cyber window-shoppers pick out different items--say, a bedroom suite--and then store those choices on the site so they can mull over the purchase. That's when Furniture.com zips off advice and additional information that might persuade them to buy. ''We're extremely close to our customer because every single day, we know what they shopped for, what they liked, and what they didn't like,'' says the 36-year-old Brooks. Since January, the site's conversion rate of visitors into buyers has more than doubled. That has to feel nearly as good as those velvet slipcovers. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
|  |
 | |
 RELATED ITEMS The Information Gold Mine TABLE: What You Need in Your Toolbox for Mining Data TABLE: The Customer-Data Motherlode E.piphany: Everything You Need to Know about Your Client Furniture.com: Turning Visitors into Buyers Gurus' Guide to Knowing Your Customer Commentary: Washington Must Step In to Protect E-Privacy INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
