Shoppers today are demanding great value, especially for big-ticket items such as furniture. To keep pace with consumer demands while still maintaining low operating costs, furniture retailer Weekends Only created a brick-and-mortar concept in which stores are open only three days a week: Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
“The overhead saved by staying closed during the week is passed along as everyday low prices, demonstrating the company mission statement: To save customers money,” said Monda Petrinelli, Senior Marketing Manager of Weekends Only, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Our target shopper is a savvy deal seeker who enjoys the thrill of the hunt and an easy, low-pressure shopping experience.”
Spurred by the success of its five brick-and-mortar stores in the St. Louis area, the Weekends Only team began looking for ways to expand its presence and make products available to customers throughout the week.
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“Although opening our retail stores only on weekends helps us keep overhead low, it wasn’t meeting the needs of customers who wanted to buy without assistance when we’re closed,” explained Dionne Dumitru, COO at Weekends Only. “We also have many customers who live an hour or more outside the metro area who love our deals and are willing to make the drive. But our business model poses a dilemma for those customers: Many of our best deals have limited supply. That’s a long drive to risk on something that might be sold by the time you get to the store.”
Creating an e-Commerce site was the most logical solution, as it helped address customer concerns without adding costs to the business, Dumitru noted. Weekends Only partnered with ShopVisible to design and implement the e-Commerce site, due to the platform’s ability to adapt and add functionality as the business grows and evolves.
Launched shortly before to Black Friday 2013, the web site experienced a surge in volume, “which was enough for us to realize we had a winner,” Dumitru said. “The first quarter of the year is always a peak time for us, and our online business is starting to ramp up quickly.”
Within the first three weeks of unveiling the site, Weekends Only experienced a 26% increase in site visits, and saw a 200% surge in average purchase price. On average, the retailer gets 17,250 visitors a week and is seeing a 0.12% conversion rate.
“We were most impressed with the great cultural fit ShopVisible had with Weekends Only, the flexibility and functionality of the solutions, and the professionalism and expertise of everyone on the team,” Dumitru said. “Your business changes constantly; your software should too. A good deal of what you’re buying is capability — of the software itself but also of the vendor.”
The Weekends Only e-Commerce site was designed to be SEO friendly, leading to an increase in weekly visits. Customer review functionality also is built in to the site, so retailer doesn’t need to integrate solutions from different vendors, which “not only costs money, but valuable developing time to make sure it functions properly on the site,” according to Dumitru.
Localization And Its Impact On The Delivery Experience
Notable features and capabilities of the Weekends Only site is consumers receive a tailored online experience based on their delivery preferences: They can either purchase products online and have them delivered, or they can purchase online and pick them up in a nearby location.
“Because all of the furniture we sell is in our distribution channel — no custom orders, no backorders while we wait for the vendor to ship it — customers love the ability to pick up at the store because they don’t have to wait for it, and they don’t have to pay for delivery,” Dumitru said. “Our stores all have pick up docks for customers and it’s part of the stores’ normal business to fulfill customer pick up orders, so we didn’t have to make any operational changes to meet online customers’ needs.”
Real-time visibility into inventory levels gives customers peace of mind that all products are available at the location they plan to visit.
“Our store assortments can be different from one store to the next, so our customers value being able to check online to see what store has what they want before they get in the car,” Dumitru noted. “It was imperative to us that we not disappoint customers, so we committed to treating the e-Commerce site as just another store.”
Online, Weekends Only sells and promotes products that are available in stores and in its distribution center, “so when we commit to selling a customer an item, we have to reserve the inventory for them in real time,” Dumitru said. “We essentially replicated the in-store reservation process with the carts in our e-Commerce system, so that all of our customers — in store or online — can be confident in our inventory availability.”
Weekends Only is collecting customer feedback so that it can continue to improve the e-Commerce site. Dumitru added that the retailer also is working on a mobile site, which “is just the next iteration of many things to come.”
