October 17, 2011
Online marketers are often seeking that cutting-edge look and feel, that latest and greatest advanced web technology, or that innovative marketing tactic that succeeds in giving a visitor a one-of-a-kind user experience. Paddock Way, an online custom made furniture store, hired Polar Design to do that and more. We brought Paddock’s inspired furniture configurator concept to life – a compelling and useful online sales tool – and won an Horizon Interactive Award for our execution.
The furniture onfigurator features a personal 3-dimensional furniture builder for the user that enables users to bring to life furniture designs that they image, and then order them online. The builder allows for thousands of combinations of furniture components and calculates the final price dynamically based on the options users select.
Select a table top option in the Paddock Way configurator and watch the table design and price update.
Sure, you may say to yourself, this sounds interesting, but how is it useful? Unlike other online purchases, online furniture buying is not an impulse buy. Furniture shoppers base their decisions on price, on look, on practicability, even on dimentions, and they take time to review purchases again and again. The question facing Paddock Way was how to engage the visitors and stand out from all other online furniture stores while doing so. A secondary objective was to capture the user’s imagination and their time by allowing them to conduct comparison shopping right on the site itself (rather than visiting other sites) due to the tool’s inherent ability to allow users to compare thousands of possible dreams.
With this system, users are able to easily select, combine, and match different components of the selected furniture as they please in order to create furniture that fits their unique taste and needs. Users are even able to personalize their furniture by engraving their name on a small steel plate affixed to the furniture, reminding them that this masterpiece was created by them.
Polar Design did not stop after winning a Horizon Interactive Award for this unique e-commerce site – it continues to help Paddock Way’s site evolve based on quantitative results of user behavior, thus ensuring the site always provides visitors a rewarding, cutting edge experience. After recent analysis of user behavior, Polar Design and Paddock Way discovered that certain users spend significant amounts of time configuring furniture but forget to save their creations by registering. We moved to implement a feature that rewards visitors that spend three or more minutes on the website using the tool that they earn a discount code if they sign up.
This has lead to an increase in registrations and accelerating the building of Paddock Way’s consumer database that will allow the brand to keep in contact with these prospective customers through its various online communication initiatives.
Paddock Way is not just an example of an award winning site, but an award winning process: from working with our client on refining their concept; executing their ultimate dream e-commerce site with our multi-skilled design and development team; monitoring the site’s performance to identify improvements in conversion and visitor flow; and then implementing those improvements. Because of this process, Polar Design provides clients high quality e-commerce sites that continually evolve and improve over time.
Read more about Paddock Way and similar projects by visiting our e-commerce portfolio or read about all of our e-commerce services.