 |
 |
 |
 |
 | ||
|
|
10.20.03 : Bellacor.com named Best Website by TCBM 07.08.03 : Internet Retailer Magazine Names Bellecor a Top E-Commerce Site 11.08.02 : The Xcel Energy Kiosk wins Gold 07.23.02 : Xcel Energy Kiosk Wins Silver AiME Award 05.22.02 : Artropolis Proudly Launches Groves Academy 10.04.00 : Artropolis Launches Bellacor |
Internet Retailer Magazine Names Bellecor a Top E-Commerce Site Internet Retailer`s Best of the Web (Housewares and Home Furnishings) 2003
Furniture rose and fell pretty quickly as an Internet retailing category. Now it's rising again. Premier home furnishings retailer Crate and Barrel, for instance, plans to expand furniture on its web site next year. "We hear from customers that they want to be able to buy more furniture online," says Joan King, Crate and Barrel's Internet manager. CrateandBarrel.com will be joining other retailers in Internet Retailer's Best of the Web. Bombay Co. recently adopted a new web strategy that features online sale of all furniture in stores. And pure-play Bellacor has built a profitable online retailing organization selling furniture and home furnishings from 700 manufacturers. The difference between the success of today's online furniture and housewares retailers and those that failed a few years ago is that today's retailers are either leveraging an offline presence or adapting offline techniques to the web, but in such a way that they are more powerful online than they are offline. Bellacor, for one, stresses that its selection is far beyond what a store could stock. "There are thousands of home furnishing and lighting vendors and manufacturers, and in a traditional system it's impossible for customers to be aware of even a small fraction," says CEO Jan Andersen. "At Bellacor they can access the universe of home furnishings. We are creating a level of connection between customers and suppliers that is not possible offline." Ditto for Cooking.com, which stocks 4,500 mostly high-end products from almost every major and niche manufacturer of better cookware. Or take Barewalls.com. The art poster site stocks 250,000 posters, a number that would overwhelm a store shopper. But sophisticated search functionality breaks those down to manageable bites. Shoppers can search by genre, subject or price. And then there's the brand issue. It was tough for the start-ups to create a brand, especially on a considered purchase like furniture or high-end cookware. But for some housewares retailers, the web site floats effortlessly on the brand. "Fortunoff.com is wildly profitable," says David Fortunoff, president of Fortunoff.com and CIO of parent Fortunoff, the small, upscale New York department store chain. The brand is so successful that the chain gets a steady stream of requests from displaced customers to open Fortunoff stores in their new areas-pressure that Fortunoff has been able to resist because it has a great web site. A full 25 percent of Fortunoff.com sales are to customers outside of the home turf of New York. Bellacor The showroom without walls Furniture sites have come and gone on the Internet-but, mostly, they've gone. That doesn't include Bellacor.com, however. Though the privately-held online furniture retailer doesn't disclose numbers, CEO Jan Andersen says sales at the two-and-a-half-year-old company are growing 100 percent yearly and that it just closed its seventh consecutive profitable quarter. Bellacor's success is a model in which its web site offers more than a store environment could ever hope to offer. For while space limits a furniture store's offering to certain lines and products, Bellacor's customers have access to more than half a million SKUs and 700 furniture manufacturers. "There are thousands of home furnishing and lighting vendors and manufacturers, and in a traditional system it's impossible for customers to be aware of even a small fraction," Andersen says. "At Bellacor they can access the universe of home furnishings. We are creating a level of connection between customers and suppliers that is not possible offline." Though Andersen says the web site does more than replicate a store, he's adopted a key element from stores in the form of product specialists in retail home furnishing sales. "Customers of home furnishings or lighting often like to have someone with them to make decisions. We have imported that online and found it extremely effective," he says. The result is a system in which customers can select and buy online unassisted, or they can e-mail, phone or fax a product specialist, who will push through product recommendations, descriptions and images. Retail consultant Keven Wilder of McMillan/-Doolittle rates attention to customer service among the site's best features, noting extensive yet easy search functionality and the display of the 800 number on each page. "By asking right on the home page if you want a personal shopper or a price quote they are anticipating your needs, and that's very helpful," she says. Those comments reflect Bellacor's focus on building sales by increasing the value of customers it already has rather than just pursuing new ones. Andersen says that in its third year, Bellacor is focusing on database marketing with the goal of segmenting e-mail campaigns and the dynamic presentation of web pages by customer group and even individuals. "A lot of pure-plays with more working capital than we will ever have failed when too much advertising spending went down the drain," he says. "Today we are more concerned about quality than the quantity of our online marketing. The key is to increase the lifetime value of customers who already come to us." Bellacor.com Launch Date - June 2000 Unique Visitors - 700,000/mo. Design By - Tunnel Design and Artropolis Inc. E-Commerce Engine - Artropolis Inc. Site Search - Artropolis Inc. CRM - Artropolis Inc. Affiliate Management - Commission Junction Inc., Performics Inc. Fulfillment - in-house Order Management - in-house Returns Liquidation - in-house Web Analytics - Artropolis Inc. Payment Processor - VeriSign Inc. Content Management - in-house E-mail Management - in-house |
|
 |
|||
