Furniture Village is the UK’s number one independently-owned furniture retailer with over 40 stores nationwide. Since it was founded in 1989, quality and service has been at the heart of the Furniture Village offering, differentiating themselves from their competitors on quality rather than price.

THE CHALLENGE

While continually achieving double-digit growth online in recent years, the existing platform had reached its full potential and would hamper future growth plans. Hence, the retailer decided to overhaul their website as part of a £1 million investment to enrich the digital and in-store experience. Knowing the extended buying cycle of their customers, it was essential that the digital experience of finding, researching and purchasing was seamless and as informative as possible, removing many of the complexities of purchasing quality furniture online. Our objectives were:

• Create a best-in-class customer journey experience
• Gain greater control and ease of ability to add products and change content
• Provide improved merchandising abilities including enhanced product details, search options and promotion management
• Improve overall scalability and resilience of the new site for peak periods
• New digital experiences optimised for “big ticket” shopping on mobile, tablet and desktop
• Integration with Amplience for improved rich content management
• Design and architecture for future-proofing of their for ERP evolution

THE STRATEGY

• We conducted an in-depth consultation programme, which included reviewing the retailer’s customer engagement roadmap and building a blue-print for a multi-phased roll-out to support the business’s plans. Workshops were conducted with the client, to re-invent the engagement and purchase process of selling “big ticket” items digitally and deliver a solution that met the best return on investment, while empowering Furniture Village to control their trading.
• Greenlight Commerce delivered a new solution on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform that included all the commerce features expected by customers to support “big ticket” products, as well as business tooling to allow for trading control and back-end integrations.

THE RESULTS

• The build took 16 weeks, including integration to over 15 systems and delivered a much faster responsive, contemporary design across mobile, desktop and tablet.
• The ongoing relationship with Greenlight Commerce is in the first phase for Furniture Village, but the Greenlight Commerce team will continue to support the new platform, as well as adding new services to enhance the ongoing digital transformation and ever demanding customer needs.