Handmade carpets are nobody’s pick for an e-commerce sure thing. For one thing, they vary in color and design from piece to piece because they’re hand-woven and made with natural dyes. Then too, while the luxurious feel of a woven rug can sell the item in a retail store, where customers can also visualize the piece in their homes, buying an expensive carpet on the Web could be an invitation to disappointment if the color turns out to be wrong or the rug is just ‘wrong” for the room.
So when third-generation rug vendor Aslan Mirkalami opted to swap his small chain of Oriental rug stores around Toronto for an online Web site, he knew he would have to make up for lost “feel appeal” with other, stronger selling points for his inventory of 10,000 one-of-a-kind carpets, mostly from master weavers of Iran.
Now in its seventh year on the Internet, Rugman.com goes to great lengths to give visitors a shopping experience that is, if anything, more satisfying than they would get from an offline rug merchant. “We looked at all the shortcomings of the retail model and tried to turn them to our advantage in the online world,” says Deborah Carkman, Rugman.com’s vice president for marketing. “We’ve compensated for not having the touch and feel of the product by making the experience much easier for the consumer in other ways.”
Start with something as simple as the way the merchandise is displayed. At a conventional rug merchant, a few premium pieces might be displayed dramatically under spotlights. But most merchandise would be stacked in groups by color and pattern. Sales staff would have to dig down through those piles, flipping rugs back until they reach the customer’s choice – at which point the buyer could only view half the pattern.
At Rugman.com site, customers can search the stock by color, size, style or price; within those ranges, they can also choose to see rugs grouped into similar categories or to see the entire range. “Our merchandising makes a huge cross-section of colors, styles, sizes, and designs available on our pages so buyers can see our diversity,” Carkman says. “In fact, when I first arrived, they had grouped the rugs on the site by color. I persuaded them that buyers didn’t necessarily want to get past five full pages of red rugs to find another color.” Other navigation choices let visitors search for rugs by room.
Each thumbnail allows the visitor to “View rug details”: not just a larger image, but an exhaustive breakout of its town of origin, age, condition, knot count per square inch, and even the time it took to make in both days and hours. The product page also gives a paragraph of content about the style of the rug, its history and traditional construction techniques.
“It’s more education than a buyer would get in a typical retail setting,” Carkman points out. “First-time buyers are often shy about asking questions about luxury products like these. We want to make sure they get not only a satisfactory experience, but as much education as they want about our products.”
Rugman shoppers also get major help envisioning the piece in their homes. They can zoom in to each thumbnail to see pattern details and come in even closer on sections to see subtle intricacies. They can even click to show the rug on different floor styles—wood, ceramic tile, marble or slate, each in up to 12 different shades. “It’s as close as you can get without physically standing on the carpet,” Carkman says. Rugman.com is currently testing software that would allow them to load in a photo of the buyer’s actual room, add the carpet under consideration, and give them a Web-based picture of what their purchase would look like in their décor.
Within two days of their online purchase, Rugman.com buyers get a courier package including a thank-you letter, a photo of their rug, care and maintenance instructions and a special reassurance that yes, that small, carefully wrapped ball they will receive in a few days is indeed their 8-foot-by-12-foot carpet. (“You’d be surprised how many people call to say that can’t possibly be the rug they bought,” Carkman says.)
Of course, with unique products such as handmade rugs, variations will mean some returned purchases. Rugman.com commissions many of its pieces directly from Iranian weavers and puts those it buys on the spot market through a rigorous quality control. These facts give the company the confidence to offer a 90-day return guarantee instead of the two- to four-day policy of most brick and mortar rug sellers. Customers simply notify the Web site and FedEx picks the product up from their home for no charge; Rugman.com even pays to insure the return.
Most customers who send a rug back turn around and buy another almost immediately, Carkman says. But then so do the satisfied customers; a large number buy a second Rugman rug within 30 days of the first purchase, and some have bought 18 rugs from the site in the space of a year. The Web site offers loyalty programs for first-time buyers, repeat buyers and referrals. And those referrals work; Carkman says 30% of their new customers were led to the site by previous shoppers.
