It’s search that drives sales at HomeClick.com
When does brand-building matter less for an online retailer? When the brands it sells already are strong in their own right, Eli Katz, CEO of HomeClick, tells InternetRetailer.com. The online retailer of upscale name-brand fixtures and tableware from Kohler and other top brands, has flown largely under the radar since launching on the web two years ago, but nevertheless expects to realize sales of well over $10 million in 2002 and also reached profitability this year, according to Katz.
“The person who already knows what they want is our best customer. They’ve done the research; they know the products in the category. So we’re focused on getting that consumer. If we build a brand incidentally, that’s great, but we’re not going to spend to put HomeClick all over the web,” says Katz.
Under that strategy, HomeClick depends heavily on search to connect with those qualified shoppers. Though it has some affiliate relationships and has done paid placements on Yahoo Shopping and AOL Shopping, search drives well over 50% of sales, Katz says.
The company does in-house optimization and also uses paid search, seeking to make its search terms as on-target as possible. “The word ‘sink,’ for example, is general, and you’re going to pay a higher cost per click for it. The term ‘kitchen sink’ is more specific, and you`re going to pay a little less per click. The term ‘stainless steel sink’ is even more specific, but you might get a customer who is looking to buy, say, a commercial sink. If you buy the term ‘Blanco sink,’ you’re going to get someone who is specifically interested in buying a Blanco sink,” Katz says.
The company does its keyword selection in-house and monitors performance not only with the reporting it gets from search engines but also by adapting software that tags every keyword and calculates the amount of revenue it brings. HomeClick also gets more out of what it spends on search with campaigns around specific model numbers. It feeds its product database to key search engines via a direct XML feed, essentially, making it easier for the engine to locate the product and deliver it in search results.
“The cost of a data feed into the engines is also a cost per click, but it’s a lot lower than some of the costs per click on keywords,” says Katz. “And with the feed, the customer isn’t just searching against some keywords but against our whole product database.” Top paid positions on keywords can cost from cents to dollars per click, depending on demand, while the cost per click on an item in an XML-fed database is a fixed cost ranging from about 5 cents to less than a dollar.
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