After customer surveys, Furniture.com transforms from a lead generator to a marketplace with the help of AI agents. GM Dan Russotto says the goal is to double its repeat shoppers.
Customers wanted it. Its retail vendors wanted it. And now, Furniture.com has it: a buy button.
For years, Furniture.com allowed shoppers to browse and compare the furniture collections of about 70 retailers, such as Walter E. Smith, Jonathan Adler, Slumberland Furniture and Bloomingdales, all in one website. When shoppers were ready to purchase, Furniture.com redirected them to the product detail page on the retailer’s website for the shopper to buy it.
In that sense, the brand was more of an aggregator for shoppers and lead generator for retailers. But both parties wanted more, said Dan Russotto, General Manager at Furniture.com.
After surveying thousands of shoppers and conducting one-on-one interviews with hundreds of customers, Furniture.com knew that shoppers became confused about why they were leaving its website to buy the product. And while retailers got a highly qualified lead and traffic to their site, that extra step to buy hurt conversion, Russotto said.
“It’s what the retailers have wanted from us from day one,” Russotto said about the buy button. “There wasn’t necessarily an easy technical way to do it. And now with agentic AI, there’s a way to do it.”
How agentic AI works for buying furniture from multiple websites
Furniture.com used AI tech platform Firmly to build multiple artificial intelligence agents to complete the buying process without shoppers having to leave the website. When a shopper hits “buy” on Furniture.com, the AI agent then goes onto the retailer or retailers’ websites to place the order. The technology has a “parent agent” that handles the general information that most retailers have, such as address and payment information. It has separate agents that can handle the nuances of each retailer, such as warranty information or selecting delivery dates. The shopper then receives a confirmation.
Furniture.com receives an information feed each night with pricing and inventory availability from all of its retail sellers. This is the information shoppers see while browsing. On the cart page, the AI agents will then go retrieve the current information and adjust if needed, such as if an item is out-of-stock or now on sale. Russotto likens it to travel website Kayak, in which the website provides its best estimate, but updates with real-time information.
Agentic AI makes the integration with dozens of retailers easier than a previous technology integration because AI agents can understand the goal outcome and context, Russotto said.
“In the old world you’d have an integration for every single partner and if anything changes, it breaks that integration and you have a lot of maintenance headache,” Russotto said. “Here, if a website or a retailer changes where the extended warranty or the delivery calendar is on their page, the agent’s smart enough to kind of adapt and say, ‘Okay, what I’m really trying to get here is the delivery calendar. It doesn’t matter whether it moved from this part to this part.’”
Goals for the new feature
Furniture.com is launching this technology now with a few retailers, with the goal of having it fully deployed by the holiday shopping season.
The goal for this transformation is to increase shopper satisfaction, double its conversion rate and double its repeat customer rate.
“We probably can double the conversions we’re currently getting because just the confusion around aggregators in general and what happens when I click this button is not always easily understood,” he said. “We believe, based on the research, that clicking on an ‘add to cart’ is a much more understood action from a shopper standpoint. And so we also believe this will significantly improve our conversions.”
With the new feature, Furniture.com is changing its pricing structure. It will now charge all retailers a 10% commission. Previously it charged retailers with a price-per-click model between $2-$4. Marketplaces commonly take a commission per sale for brands that sell on the platform. Amazon.com, for example, on average charges sellers a 15% commission. Russotto said a 10% commission is a reasonable fee, as the cost for a furniture retailer to acquire a customer is often higher than 10%.
“We’re targeting lots of shoppers that don’t necessarily have brand affinity,” he said. “We’re bringing these customers and hand delivering the revenue with a 10% commission. The cost of acquisition is much higher; it could be upwards of 30%-40% for some of these retailers.”
While Furniture.com helps generate the sale, it is now on the retailer to provide shipping information and all the customer service. That also means that unlike a traditional online marketplace, the retailer receives the customer information for remarketing opportunities.
Furniture.com turns up marketing efforts
Now that Furniture.com has a buy button, it can start ramping up its marketing efforts, such as with Google shopping ads or offering a promotion for shoppers who are purchasing multiple products in one transaction.
The marketplace is in the pilot phase of marketing to optimize its spend. For example, it is testing its designated market areas and different channels, such as TV commercials and paid social. It has held back on full-scale marketing until it had higher repeat shopper rate, he said.
“You don’t want to have to buy the shopper every single time,” Russotto said. “You want to be able to spend money on marketing and then have the confidence to know that they’re going to come back.”
With this new feature, Russotto is confident that shoppers will come back and buy again.
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