At Blueport, some of the most valuable insights we provide to our clients lie deep in the data. As a part of our ecommerce team, I look to data as the beacon that guides ecommerce strategy, helping us best optimize revenue for our furniture retail clients.
Recently, the ecommerce team at Blueport conducted an extensive analysis on search facets, an important search feature on the Blueport Platform that helps customers narrow down their furniture selection. In an effort to improve our search functionality, we set out to identify how customers are utilizing facets in their shopping journey and the results were fascinating. Let’s take a look at the different ways shoppers segmented across major furniture categories.
What are Search Facets?
Search facets are filters in search results that allow shoppers to refine their search by various attributes such as color, price, or dimension. As an example, on typical sectional category pages, we allow customers to segment by color, price, style, brand, and more to help bring back results aligned with their preferences.
Search tools like facets play a critical part in ecommerce site functionality since they help shoppers find what they want within a typically large assortment of products more quickly. Across the Blueport Platform, 15% of annual web sessions involve the use of site search and/or filtering to find products.
How Furniture Shoppers use Search Facets In their Furniture Shopping Journey
Over the course of two months, we looked at how shoppers utilize search across the Blueport Platform to understand the attributes that are most important to them when refining their search. We looked at the use of attributes within search facets across five furniture categories—sofas, sectionals, dining tables, mattress sets, and bedroom sets.
Sofas: On sofa category pages, color was by far the most important attribute for shoppers when refining their search. Customers filtered by color nearly two times more than the next-highest performing filter, material. Price was also an important attribute after color and material. Also noteworthy is that height, width and depth were hardly used. From what we’ve seen customers aren’t limiting themselves to size when they initially search for products, but this information is more important on the product detail page as they consider purchasing a product.
Sectionals: Sofas and sectionals share many similar facets—and ones that had higher use in sofas overlapped with sectionals. The use of color, material, and price facets were consistent across both categories.
Dining Tables: Table shape is by far and away the most important attribute when shoppers search in the dining table category, used nearly five times more than the next highest facet, color. The overwhelming use of table shape indicates customers have strong preferences for a round, oval, square or rectangle, but are more flexible when it comes to color or material. This could be because there tends to be a smaller variety of color in the dining category than in the upholstery category.
Mattress Sets: Interestingly, brand matters more to mattresses sets than any other category, as well as other mattress-specific facets like mattress size and firmness. Not surprisingly, color, which was a leading facets that shopper often leveraged in other categories, was among the least significant facets for brands. The differences by category suggests the importance of utilizing a powerful site search engine that allows you to optimize facets based on category.
Bedroom Packages: In the bedroom packages category, shoppers looked to color and mattress size facets most often to narrow down their options.
As takeaways from this close look at facet use on our sites, here are the trends within categories that will prove useful as you’re shaping your own merchandising strategy:
- For upholstery products: prioritize having the correct and complete color information.
- For dining: customers have strong preferences on table shape, but more flexibility when it comes to color or material.
- For mattresses: you may also consider displaying mattress brands prominently with their associated products given the importance brand is in the mattress shopping experience.
Additionally, it’s interesting that dimension attributes like width, depth, or height are not as important for filtering when customers are initially searching for product. Customers don’t want to limit themselves by those options, however it’s likely important once customers decide to look at a product as a final check to ensure it will fit in their home.
Shoppers Tend to Use Sort Feature for Price Instead Of Facets
As you may have noticed from the charts above, price consistently comes up as a popular facet across each category, but is never listed as the top facet. This is likely due to the fact that shoppers can also use a dropdown feature within the search functionality that can sort product price low to high and high to low in search results.
In addition to how customers look at search facets, we wanted to look into how shoppers used pricing segmenting tools to find bargain products on different category pages. Across the board, shoppers use the price search facet less frequently than the drop-down sort price feature across these five categories.
As an important attribute for conversion, price data will always matter—but it’s also important to enable the most convenient ways for customers to find this information. We found it interesting that customers are less likely to filter and narrow down selection by seeing a specific price range (like between $200 – $500 or $500 – $1,000), but instead more likely to see all products in ascending order to scan lower priced options first.
To close out this deep dive into search trends, we think it’s crucial for retailers to pay attention to how shoppers are using your site through a pair of data binoculars. How these shoppers are browsing your catalog will inform how you merchandise, and the data you excavate will be the key to optimizing their website experiences and to selling considered purchases like furniture online.
With the right revenue-driving tools to capture data, you can measure every living, breathing metric on your site to maximize your opportunities to sell more—and you can do it all with the Blueport Platform. Learn more about our about our Ecommerce Services at Blueport Commerce and check back in to see what furniture ecommerce insights we’ll leverage next.
