Guild.com borrows lessons from its catalog to lift web site sales
Plenty of multi-channel retailers have recently reported their web sites as the star-performing channel. But online seller of original art Guild.com is borrowing some of the lessons learned from its catalog – more grounded in traditional merchandising and direct marketing techniques -- to make its web site more effective.
Sales from Guild’s year-and-a-half-old catalog have been running an average 22% above plan so far this holiday season, says executive vice president of retail operations Scott Treadwell, spiking significantly higher on some days. Treadwell hopes to capture some of that lift from the catalog for the flatter sales at the company’s two-and-a-half-year-old web site as well.
“We’re using what we’ve learned in the catalog to drive decisions on the web this year,” Treadwell says. “The early thought on the Internet was that more is better. We had huge numbers of items online in each category.” But based on results for Guild’s more selective catalog offering, the company has reduced the assortment on the web. “We’re removing artwork from the site that doesn’t fit our merchandising point of view,” says Treadwell. “We’re making sure we offer items that are complementary and we’re focused on selecting those that appeal to a wider constituency.” In addition, Guild.com has shifted its online assortment toward merchandise available at prices geared to appeal for holiday gift giving.
To improve the web site’s financial performance, the company also has scaled back on its online advertising relationships, focusing on those that have produced the best results, and it’s changing the structure of all its ad partnerships to a pay-for-performance model. Treadwell says Guild.com also will manage its advertising units differently, going forward; for example, by making links that deliver customers on click-through from an affiliate directly to specially created “landing pages” at Guild.com that feature complementary products on the page along with the searched-for item. “Instead of just delivering the shopper on click- through to our home page or even to the specific item being searched for, we`ll really be merchandising everything the online shoppers sees,” Treadwell says.
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