Bulbs.com site relaunch lights the way to the right purchase
All 60-watt light bulbs are not equal. The shopper on Bulbs.com might pull up 40 choices when searching for that product, differentiated by attributes that are in some cases better known to professional electricians or lighting designers than homeowners. “The lighting business is complicated,” says vice president of marketing Mike Connors. “A lot of products can fit into the same socket but give a very different look and feel to the environment. So lighting can become a headache when you have to buy specialized lighting.”
To tackle that problem and feed its already 70%-plus repeat customer business, Bulbs.com, which sells to homeowners as well as commercial businesses, last year launched a new web site that improves on customers’ ability to match up what they need for a particular light fixture with the right product in Bulbs.com’s offering.
For example, the site now provides an attribute search so shoppers can filter the options.
It’s a follow-on to efforts over the past few years by Bulbs.com to broaden its information database on products. “We have tried to narrow down choices on the products for residential use so it’s a little easier for customers to identify what they need,” Connors says. “If they know the base or type of bulb they need, or the wattage—things that they might have a reasonably good probability of knowing—they can continue to narrow the search.”
Bulbs.com also added more descriptive information to the site, and it supplies ongoing support for the 20-person outbound sales team at its call center. Bulbs.com grows sales in part by using the outbound team to follow up on initial orders from large or commercial customers to pursue the rest of the customer’s lighting business, Connors says. “We end up doing a lot of education,” he adds.
All Bulbs.com orders are taken online. One metric Bulbs.com uses in measuring the success of efforts to better connect customers with the right product is the rate of product return against orders. Connors says that while the number of mis-ordered products is already small compared to the number of orders taken, the return rate has seen further incremental decreases since the site relaunch.
“This is one of the ways we can measure how effective we are on the front end with the selection and purchase process, by either helping customers with richer content on the web site or helping them on the phone,” he says. “The crowing achievement would be if we went a month without having a single customer come to the web site and purchase the wrong thing. We want to make the purchase process as simple as we can for the customers who come to the web site."
Bulbs.com is No. 390 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide .
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