Future Forward Furnishings - Interior Design

Primary Service: Design & Development

Primary Technologies:

Custom BigCommerce HubSpot Integration Personalization Interior Design

+79%

Traffic

+75%

Orders

+194%

Revenue

The Background

This Custom BigCommerce HubSpot Integration Personalized An Interior Design Shop

In this case study, we're keeping things anonymous to respect the privacy of the brands involved. We'll call the interior design firm we're focusing on "Future Forward Furnishings" and their construction partner "Apex Construction".

Future Forward Furnishings serves as the exclusive interior decorating firm for Apex Construction on the East Coast of the United States. When a new home is purchased through Apex Construction, the buyers are offered discounted rates on interior design services by Future Forward Furnishings. If new home buyers opted to participate, their furniture would be placed in their new home as soon as construction had been finished.

Before the launch of the all-new Future Forward Furnishings site, the entire interior design process was done over the phone and in person. Both Future Forward Furnishings and Apex Construction were searching for a way for homebuyers to seamlessly buy furniture collections online, that were curated for their specific floorplan.

The Challenge: The Need For A B2B-Focused Platform

Bringing The Interior Design Experience Online

Future Forward Furnishings had previously never sold online before. While they did have a website, it was a simple static site that offered basic information about the business without much else. The only goal of the site was to provide basic information and get clients to book an appointment.

For many small businesses, creating an online catalog of products for the first time is fairly straightforward. They make a list of products and assign names, descriptions, images, and prices to those products. Those products are then added to the website by category and the site is brought online. In reality, things are more complex - but that’s the basic idea.

In the case of Future Forward Furnishings, this simplistic process wouldn’t work. Since the majority of Future Forward Furnishings’s sales come from new home builds, products need to be organized first by floor plan and room, then by style such as "Contemporary," "Traditional," "Farmhouse," and "Transitional."

On top of that, this website should know which floorplan the user has, showing them relevant options only. Most customers choose to purchase entire room sets at one time. Innovating a way to seamlessly bundle and un-bundle the individual products that make a room collection was our task.

We’re unaware of any native eCommerce platform functionality that would allow for this out of the box. Challenges like this are exactly why we keep our team of eCommerce developers and designers in-house.

A Unique Experience for Each User

When a customer of Apex Construction purchases a new home, they are automatically assigned an interior designer from Future Forward Furnishings to work with, should they choose to do so. Future Forward Furnishings wished for online users to feel the same “personal touch” from their dedicated designer as a customer would feel in real life.

Future Forward wanted users to see their home model, floorplan, as well as their assigned designer's name and face across the site. This was all required to remind customers that they have a human resource to contact with any questions they may have. Even with this information pulled, we still needed to find a clean solution that allowed customers to communicate with their dedicated designer.

What About Those Who Haven’t Purchased A New Home?

For visitors who had not purchased a new Apex Construction home, this retailer wanted to offer a traditional eCommerce experience. This means that they would arrive on a typical homepage, browse by category or search, locate their product(s), and check out. The question our team needed to solve was: “How would the BigCommerce site know that this specific user had not purchased a home?”

A traditional system like this working alongside the logged-in experience mentioned above was a new challenge we were excited to take on.

Custom BigCommerce HubSpot Integration Personalization Interior Design Desktop

Custom BigCommerce HubSpot Integration Personalization Interior Design Mobile

Custom BigCommerce HubSpot Integration Personalization Interior Design Product Detail

The Solution:

BigCommerce Personalization with HubSpot

With the challenge of creating a unique and tailored BigCommerce experience for each new Apex Construction homeowner, our team landed on a solution that could address all of Future Forward Furnishings’s needs: A BigCommerce HubSpot Integration.

HubSpot is a leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform used by companies across all verticals to store customer information. The platform is highly flexible, allowing for custom properties to be assigned to contacts, among many other features. In this case, we created custom properties for the Interior Designer Assigned, Closing Date, Community, First/Last Name, Floorplan, Name of Model, and Name of Assigned Designer.

These HubSpot properties are then transferred into the BigCommerce site’s backend. This enables BigCommerce to display the relevant information contained in those properties across the site. This allows for logged-in users to feel that the website knows who they are, what home floorplan was purchased, and much more - all in a seamless environment.

Since all of this information is collected, we can bundle room collections together for a purchase that is guaranteed to fit and look great in a specific room of the customer’s new home. If they choose to do so, customers can additionally un-bundle their products to purchase them individually.

Floorplans, Styles, & Your Assigned Designer

So, how does the BigCommerce HubSpot Integration leverage personalization from a customer experience perspective? While personalization is sprinkled throughout the site, two major features steal the show.

When a user logs into the site, they are immediately greeted with a photo of their assigned interior designer and a welcome message from their designer that is specific to the model of their new home. They can then shop by style for each room of the house. If the user is looking for a complete dining room set in a “traditional” style, they are offered collections guaranteed to fit in the layout of their new home. Since Future Forward Furnishings has previously tested these items in finished Apex Construction homes, photos are displayed that showcase how these furniture pieces will look in the buyer’s home.

Additionally, the interior designer’s name and photo are shown as a live chat popup across the site. If a customer chooses to engage, they are prompted by the chatbot to book a time on their assigned designer’s calendar, courtesy of the BigCommerce HubSpot Integration. Once booked, an email confirmation along with a video call calendar invite is sent to the customer.

Individual Items, Styles, & Collections

For users visiting the site from other channels such as referrals or organic search, we crafted a more traditional eCommerce site which we refer to as the “Product Categorization Experience.” Users arrive at a homepage, browse through product categories, and find the items they would like to purchase.

Similar to the logged-in experience, this version of the site features an "Inspiration" section, where users can browse different styles like "Contemporary," "Traditional," "Farmhouse," and "Transitional" to shop for the look they prefer.