How we recover revenue for an online furniture store
Seeing your business grow from a standing start to become a thriving ecommerce operation in a handful of years is every young entrepreneur’s dream. But continuing to deliver great service while handling peak online demand can be tricky. Enterprising online furnishings brand Furniturebox turned to thinkTRIBE to resolve a series of hard-to-track web problems that were threatening to derail the company’s success.
Established just seven years ago, Furniturebox has captured British buyers’ imaginations with its winning proposition: a stylish online collection of contemporary and affordable furniture reliably delivered to the door. When the pandemic hit, the brand’s sales soared.
An online success story
Founded by teen entrepreneurs Monty and Dan, Furniturebox has focused on two things: quality construction and outstanding service. It’s a formula that’s created a positive feedback loop, resulting in valuable recommendations and more satisfied customers.
With business increasing exponentially – not least in response to the lockdown-prompted spike in home improvements – the West Country-based company expanded its team and relaunched its Magento website just ahead of Black Friday 2020.
A satisfactory online user experience (UX) is the foundation stone of any customer journey. However, despite a promising start, the new website began returning some hard-to-track checkout issues that were seriously impacting the user experience, drastically undermining conversion rates and slashing revenues by two-thirds – more or less overnight.
Not only did thinkTRIBE track the source of our original problem, but they also then found about 15 other issues in the journeys. We have integrated thinkTRIBE’s user journeys into our tech stack and – thanks to the wallboard – we can check on the health of the site at any time. – James Ewen Head of eCommerce
Restoring momentum
Head of Ecommerce at Furniturebox, James Ewens, wanted to urgently reverse the trend but the site’s developers were unable to pinpoint any specific problems. It didn’t help that the checkout issues were apparently intermittent: sometimes the add-to-basket buttons worked and sometimes they didn’t.
By running realistic user journeys across Furniturebox’s digital estate, we were able to quickly uncover and support them in resolving the issues found. Our Video Replayer captures and replays problems, which can then be sent to Furniturebox’s dev team.
‘thinkTRIBE proved – to us and the developers – that there were problems with the site, giving us the error logs and recordings that showed the exact point of failure so we could push for a fix. It completely restored our momentum and gave us the confidence to believe in our own data.’
‘We would never have been able to fix the problems we were experiencing without thinkTRIBE. We’ve changed and paused journeys and moved them to our staging site. Throughout, we’ve had amazing support.’
Picking up the pace
Furniturebox was able to reboot its customer experience, regaining its focus on conversions and – by deploying thinkTRIBE’s round-the-clock performance monitoring solution – enabling the team to swiftly tackle any recurring problems.
‘When we had problems before, we’d worry that every dip in sales meant that the site had fallen over somewhere. Now we know that as long as the thinkTRIBE wallboard is green, the website is available and responsive, whatever the sales numbers say.
‘It’s not only helped us to recover our lost revenues – equating to tens of thousands of pounds every day – but has also given us the peace of mind to leave the performance monitoring to the professionals and focus on our own objectives. It’s genuinely the best software service I’ve ever used – from initial setup to the quality of aftercare, it’s been pretty much flawless.’
In my experience, you don’t get that level of service with other companies. Not only did thinkTRIBE recover the income from our website but it paid for itself in just two days of revenue.’
Moving forward
Furniturebox is on a steep growth trajectory. Fine-tuning eCommerce operations to ensure optimal engagement is key to making good progress now and in the future. James plans to use thinkTRIBE as part of the company’s online strategy:
‘Now we’ve got the monitoring resource in place, we’ve got more control. We can see what’s broken and fix it before it becomes a major problem – and thinkTRIBE will provide all the data. It’s a pretty nice position to be in.’
‘Now we’re back on track, we’re using thinkTRIBE’s web monitoring in a more strategic way – it’s giving us the analytics and the insight to optimise performance, rather than just troubleshooting errors. It means we can plan for the future with greater confidence.’