The outbreak of Covid-19 has forced a lot of businesses to speed up their digitalization process. Starting an e-commerce website from scratch is not a piece of cake and many have failed to make an online presence. Today, we would like to share with you an interesting talk we had with Mr. Dylan Buchfink - Director and CEO of The Mattress & Sleep Company.
From a successful brick-and-mortar chain, Dylan and his team opened an online business several years ago. The online store of The Mattress & Sleep Company has been using the Product Filter & Search app by Boost Commerce to solve some challenges of purchasing online and sealing more deals.
The Mattress & Sleep Company was established in 2006. Back then, even for a product category that most customers need to test out in person, there would be a significant benefit to providing detailed information on the website to help aid in the research process.
It took Dylan and the team several years to understand how their product selection could best be presented online. Perhaps the biggest challenge was how frustrating it was for a small business to develop a website to suit their needs. Much of the website content needed to be manually created and deployed, which resulted in pages that had a lot of out-of-date information, a frustrating situation for both themselves and their customers.
It really wasn’t until they moved to Shopify and integrated Boost Product Filter & Search that they could truly implement what they felt were the right set of tools to provide their customers with an easy way to find the information they’re looking for.
Once they decided to move to Shopify, they had their wish list of features built up over the previous decade, so they had a reasonably clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish. From that list, they prioritized their must-have features and made it a requirement to pick apps that could be utilized from day one of the development process.
Surprisingly, Boost Product Filter & Search was not Dylan's choice in the first place. They tried two or three other apps and each fell well short of their needs. Where Boost FPS is clearly ahead of the others is the backend app. It’s very user-friendly, well laid out, and clear to understand. Even though Boost PFS offers more features, the learning curve was almost non-existent.
The Boost app was one such app that they discovered very early in our Shopify development phase and it quickly became a critical part of their new website. And now, Dylan and his team has been using our app for around 2 years.
The functionality of the app was a near-perfect fit for their needs. It did require quite a bit of template customization and Nicolas, in particular, was exceptionally helpful in executing the specific changes needed.
After the release of revenue tracking last year, Dylan's team and other Boost users can know exactly how much sales are generated by our app. As for The Mattress & Sleep Company, the app reports $47,000 in sales generated.
Despite the fact that online orders account for a marginal number of sales (around 3%), Dylan is certain that: “Our online sales have certainly increased since migrating to Shopify and implementing PFS”.
Visitors regularly filter by the mattress or pillow size - ie: Double, Queen, King. It appears that they really like the ability to filter products by the size they're looking for.
The three collections that have the most filter clicks are Mattresses, Electric Beds, and Bed Linens. These are all types of products that can be difficult to browse without the ability to filter the results by specific attributes (ie: size or color)
When asked about a favorite feature, Dylan's pick is the Merge values function.
“Our product catalog is vast! Especially in the bedding and towel categories. We have many products which are offered in 60 or more colors. By utilizing the Merge values function, we’re able to organize our colors into groupings that are easier for our customers to browse.
Similarly, this function also works perfectly for harmonizing slight variances in sizing between different vendors. Rather than having 20 different “queen size” mattress and bedding options that vary by only a few centimeters, it is much easier for the customer to be presented with a “Queen” size option, while still maintaining the ability to list the exact dimensions in the Product variants.” - Dylan shared.
More lessons learned from other case studies:
“The Boost app has been a great feature for us, even though we're primarily (97%) a bricks & mortar retailer. Our product catalog is quite complex and it really helps our in-store customers browse our website effectively.”
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