Leading home improvement retailer improves conversions by over 20% with Onsite Comparative Pricing Solution
About Build.com
Build.com is the third largest online home improvement retailer, and currently ranks 97 on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide. Build.com’s goal is to provide the best selection and buyer experience, as well as unmatched customer service, to consumers involved in a wide range of home improvement projects. Build.com is the parent company of about half a dozen specialty stores specializing in plumbing, HVAC, lighting, and door hardware.
The Challenge: Keeping the Customers on the Site
Build.com seeks to provide the best online purchasing experience for consumers engaged in a home improvement project. In fact, each product page offers detailed product specs, consumer reviews, and a box that lets visitors pose product questions to the community at large. Thanks to this effort, the company’s sites serve as excellent resources to consumers.
Unfortunately, the home improvement market is notoriously sensitive to price, and for Build.com that meant far too many consumers were using its resources to find and research products they liked, and then leaving for a comparative shopping engine (CSE) to find the absolute lowest price.
This was a costly scenario for Build.com which, like all serious online retailers, invests in paid search to attract potential customers. “We were paying for visitors and they found our sites useful. Our challenge was to keep them onsite until they purchased,” explained Brandon Proctor, Vice President of Marketing for Build.com. To increase profitability, Mr. Proctor needed a way to enable consumers to do the comparison shopping they were going to do anyway, but without leaving Build.com.
Another challenge: Home improvement projects are complex, and often consumers ultimately learn that the buying experience is just as important as price. Build.com needed a way to instill buyers' confidence in the purchasing cycle so that even if products cost slightly less at another retailer’s site, Build.com would still be that consumer’s first choice.
The Solution: Onsite Comparative Prices
To address these challenges, Build.com turned to WinBuyer, a leading provider of conversion and revenue optimization solutions for online retailers. WinBuyer offers a comparison shopping solution – known as Onsite Comparative Prices (OCP) – that Build.com opted to test on two of its sites, FaucetDirect.com and LightingDirect.com.
Onsite Comparative Pricing is a service that displays comparison shopping information directly on a retailer’s product page. The solution enables prospective consumers to compare offers from multiple retailers without leaving the retailer’s website – a key goal of Build.com.
WinBuyer provides retailers with a great deal of flexibility on how they implement OCP on their sites. For instance, Mr. Proctor’s team was free to customize the look and feel of the pricing comparison display; select the number of competitive prices visitors see; as well as choose the range of competitive prices to display. For example, Build.com could show the prices of merchants that offered similar prices, lower prices, higher prices or a mix of all three.
Mr. Proctor and his team tested WinBuyer over a four-week period, and had a sample size of nearly 135,000 unique visitors. “We used A/B testing to test all the price algorithms, as well as the message, layout and flow,” explained Mr. Proctor.
The winning combination for FaucetDirect.com turned out to be the “Compare our Prices” message, along with showing visitors a mix of merchants that offered similar and higher prices. “These results surprised us at first. One would assume that by telling visitors about our competitors we’d lose sales, but the opposite actually happened. We learned that by being open and honest with our visitors we’re sending the message that Build.com offers the best buying experience,” said Mr. Proctor.
Caption: WinBuyer provides a window into the listings of Comparative Shopping Engines and affiliate networks, letting consumers compare prices directly from FaucetDirect.com product pages.
Tangible Results: Substantial Lifts in Conversion, AOV and RPV!
Within four weeks, FaucetDirect.com discovered that WinBuyer was able to deliver on its promise of helping them win buyers.
By showing visitors how the company’s prices compare to other retailers, Build.com has seen dramatic increases in FaucetDirect’s conversion rate (20.59%), average order value (13.09%) and revenue per visit ($36.35).
“Being open and honest about how we compare to the competition keeps visitors on our site,” said Mr. Proctor. “WinBuyer has had a significant and sustainable impact on our business.”
Results of WinBuyer OCP:
“WinBuyer has had a significant and sustainable impact on our business.” Brandon Proctor, VP Marketing, Build.com
Going forward, Mr. Proctor plans to roll-out WinBuyer on more of Build.com’s sites. He and his team will repeat A/B testing on their other sites to ensure the same stellar results.
About WinBuyer
WinBuyer provides online retailers with solutions that optimize site revenues. By giving shoppers pricing information and compelling offers when they need it most, WinBuyer’s platform improves consumer confidence, drives conversion rates and monetizes site traffic. WinBuyer’s flagship solution, Onsite Comparative Pricing (OCP), enables retailers to accelerate consumer purchasing behavior by allowing the consumer to compare prices without leaving the retailer’s site.
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