How Wayfair Used Data & SEO to Transform E-Commerce
In 2002, Steve Conine and Niraj Shah founded CSN Stores, the parent company of more than 250 standalone websites that sold household items ranging from barstools to stereo racks (Wayfair, 2019). The idea of having standalone e-commerce websites came from carefully analyzing internet search patterns and was deeply rooted in search engine optimization, coming to the conclusion that offering a large selection of a specific item on a website will drive traffic to shoppers looking for that category of item. They managed websites such as AllBarsStools.com, EveryMirror.com, and BedroomFurnitureDirect.com, each offering thousands of selections as well as editorial content on how to pick the right mirror or bar stool, or whatever the specific category the website was selling (Peterson, 2014).
Although they saw about 4.8 million customers by 2010 (Peterson, 2014), CSN Stores was having a hard time growing its repeat customer base. The next year, Conine and Shah decided to take the leave and moved all of their e-commerce sites into one destination and named it Wayfair. Wayfair offers over 14 million products from more than 10,000 suppliers across five distinct brands - Wayfair.com, AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main and Perigold (Wayfair, 2019).
A Data-Driven Approach
From its inception in 2002, Wayfair was deeply rooted in the world of digital analytics and search engine optimization. They’ve used data to drive every one of their business decisions- even coming forward and claiming that Wayfair's investments in data science have been a core driver of its success to date (Conine, 2018). This is evident in their investment in data science, employing a team made up of more than 1600 engineers and data scientists, some of which have the responsibility to act on real-time marketing, customer product and logistics data (Grill-Goodman, 2018)."On average, we capture and store four terabytes of data every day and over the course of a year, we track approximately 40 billion customer actions on our site, putting us in a great position to generate data driven insight to improve the experience of our customers," said Steve Conine, co-founder and co-chairman of Wayfair.
"One of our unique advantages is that our data science team impacts the entire customer experience. Even before a customer is familiar with the Wayfair brand, we have proprietary marketing measurement models that prioritize the type of ads and creative content that are likely to be most engaging to specific groups of potential customers across digital, direct mail and television marketing. When customers reach our site, our algorithms consider aspects around product diversity, style, popularity and more to offer an engaging experience every visit."
Wayfair’s Visual Search
“We're not just using data to make those matches across our data set: we're measuring whether someone stays on-site after submitting a visual search query, whether they buy an item and when they return to shop at Wayfair again," says Matt Zisow, Wayfair’s Director of Product.
An Unlikely SEO Innovator
Big data science and analysis aside, Wayfair has proven to be a thought-leader in the SEO realm. Just by looking at their startup years, you see that their business model was using SEO as their main strategic driver, having sites like EveryMirror.com, where they’d sell every type of mirror they could find, so people searching for that particular item would likely end up in their highly specialized website, and once there, see their vast offerings of mirror to choose from, driving high conversion rates.Google then diminished the importance of having a keyword in the URL, which was an obvious part of their business strategy. Wayfair has since learned that the SEO realm is an ever-changing strategy, implementing various initiatives to keep them on the first page of search engine ranking pages. Some innovative SEO initiatives and strategies Wayfair has implemented across the years include:
- Wayfair turned to creating thematic pages, producing a category page for anyone searching for a specific item. Using a platform that auto-creates these pages for them, Wayfair is able to create different pages for different kinds of long-tail or short-tail searches (Haden, 2012).
- Wayfair uses unique keywords, such as “Find the Perfect Sofa.” In 2016, Wayfair was the only furniture retailer that returned in organic search results with that keyword, placing on the first page of the search engine rankings page (Koene, 2016). Even now, using the search term “Black Sofa” yielded results where Wayfair was first in paid and organic results.
- Wayfair understands the psychology of its website visitors. For example, Wayfair uses audience segmentation to identify visitors that have children under 12 years of age who are shopping specifically for couches. It accompanies its sofa category search results page with a snippet: “When purchasing a couch, the most important factor to keep in mind is the sofa fort-ability of the couch in questions. Price, size and color may also be taken into consideration, but only as secondary features to the sofa fort potential of the piece you’re looking into. As such, we have compiled several sofa fort designs that you may keep in mind while searching for your new couch” (Koene, 2016).
On-Page SEO
One thing businesses can learn from Wayfair is that consistent testing and optimizations in on-page SEO to increase conversions and drive sales. Navigating the company’s website has me feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I decided to start from the very beginning and search “black sofa” on Google. Unsurprisingly so, Wayfair was the first result on the SERP, with a headline of “Black Sofas You’ll Love.” I was lead to a category landing page that had exactly what I wanted: black sofas.
My immediate problem? It was so busy, and the black sofas I was looking for where almost below the fold. This made me wonder- how would this look if I was casually browsing on my mobile device?
The mobile view was not any better. My suggestion would be to have “sale” items or consider “most popular” couches before the filter options. This way, I see some popular choices before I decide to refine my search further. I also think the banner advertisement for Hooker Furniture might be unnecessary- if this is a landing page for the category I searched for, I know I specifically want a black couch and will stay on this page to look for it.
A final recommendation I’d make is pertaining to item-specific landing pages. Once I click on an item that I am interested in, the call-to-action button is not really found above the fold. Once again, scrolling down on the item page causes me to just glance over at all of the imagery and information they have, to the point that I just glance over it, feel overwhelmed, and click out of the items page.
The item’s page includes item-specific information, but also “Compare Similar Items,” Customers Also Viewed,” “You Might Also Need,” “Related Products,” and “Related Searches.” I’d like to see the CTA button above the fold, and fewer suggestions on the site. There is a number of items on this page that can be consolidated so I can focus on the item I am interested in.
Resources.
https://www.wayfair.com/v/about/our_story
Peterson (2014). Here's The Story Behind Wayfair, The Oddly Named $3 Billion Home Goods Retailer That Just Went Public. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-behind-wayfair-2014-10
Grill-Goodman (2018). Data Science Investments a "Core Driver" of Wayfair's E-Commerce Success. Retreived from https://risnews.com/data-science-investments-core-driver-wayfairs-e-commerce-success
Perez, S. (2017). Wayfair takes on Pinterest with its own visual search engine for home furnishings. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/wayfair-takes-on-pinterest-with-its-own-visual-search-engine-for-home-furnishings/
DeNisco-Rayome, A. (2017). How Wayfair used big data and omnichannel retail to transform shopping. Retrieved from https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-wayfair-used-big-data-and-omnichannel-retail-to-transform-shopping/
Haden. (2012). Lessons from Wayfair. Retrieved from https://www.hadeninteractive.com/lessons-from-wayfair-com/
Koene, J. (2016). Emotional SEO: Finding your online Cookie Monster. Retrieved from https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/emotional-seo/
Similar Web (2019). Wayfair.com. Retrieved from https://www.similarweb.com/website/wayfair.com
MobiReady (2019) Wayfair Website Mobile Readiness. Retrieved from https://ready.mobi
Hey Enma,
ReplyDeleteI really liked your research and resulting commentary on Wayfair. Especially the insight as to their look into the actual pschycology of some of the key word search phrases. Very interesting.
Thanks