For the vast majority of furniture and design brands that sell consumer products, distribution through online retailers remains the primary sales channel. Despite many brands expanding their own online stores to sell directly to consumers, direct sales by European furniture and design brands remain small as of early 2024. Consequently, these brands increasingly rely on eTailer's for both sales and building brand awareness.

One of the great privileges we have on our mission to help furniture & design brands scale their retailer networks is all the learnings we collect from speaking to so many iconic brands. Below is our attempt to give back by summarising parts of this knowledge into some of the key strategies that brands apply to ensure that their product and brand has maximum visibility at their online retailers.

Consumer behaviour: from discovery to purchase

Consumers end up at online retailers either wanting to buy a specific product or while in an discovery phase. When a consumer are in the bottom of the funnel having set their eyes on a specific product you as the brand have already won and most probably this will end up with a purchase from either your own e-commerce store or (more likely) from the eTailer which offers your product at the lowest price.

For the category of consumers that hasn’t yet made up their mind on a specific brand but know that they want to buy a certain kind of product, for example a “kitchen pendel lamp”, good visibility at eTailer's become key and can produce a high impact on overall sales.

Where to be seen at eTailer's

For consumers in the discovery phase, the most frequent paths to discovering products they like on an online retailer's site are:

1. Category pages.

2. Home page.

3. Search.

4. Product recommendations.

5. Banner ads.

1. Category pages

One of the most crucial places for showcasing your products as a design and furniture company is on the relevant category pages of your eTailer. This is where many consumers land when they decide to buy a pendant lamp for their kitchen but don't have a specific brand or product in mind.

Many eTailer’s feature a variety of categories where your products could be relevant. You as a brand need to ensure that your product is visible on each relevant category.

Once you've secured visibility for your products across all key categories, the next significant challenge is to ensure that your products are listed on the first category page of the eTailer's default sorting-typically 'most relevant' or 'most popular,' which often imply the same. If your products aren't on the first or perhaps the second page, they might as well be invisible in that category

In our proprietary data we have found that consumers are more inclined to explore a product from a brand on a category page if that brand features two or more listings on the same category page. This suggests to consumers that the brand is particularly popular within that category, owning several top products, which in turn boosts their confidence in the brand.

2. Home page

A highly effective method for consumers in their product discovery phase to encounter your brand is if they visit a design-niched eTailer's homepage and see your brand highlighted there. eTailers commonly feature product collection carousels showcasing various brands. An example of this can be seen on Andlight in Denmark:

What you can also find are mentions of brands with a link to the brand pages. Here is one example from Ambientedirect:

The strategies mentioned above greatly benefit your brand. Yet, an approach that can significantly amplify impact on consumers in the discovery phase involves eTailer'ss linking to your brand page with a more prominent media display, perhaps highlighting one of your products. Here is an example of this, from Jensen Company in Denmark:

The product card located furthest to the right directs consumers to Louis Poulsen's brand page, allowing them to explore the entire range of Louis Poulsen lamps. This strategic placement makes a remarkable impression on your brand, significantly enhancing the likelihood that a consumer in the discovery phase, particularly those looking for a new kitchen pendant lamp, will peruse products from your brand and potentially make a purchase.

3. Search

Search is of varying importance dependent on if the eTailer's that you distribute your products through have semantic search capabilities and are thus able to understand the intent in queries that dosen't mention a specific product name or brand. This is in the beginning of 2024 rather uncommon amongst European eTailer's in design & furniture but expected to grow. The exceptions are the large eTailer's and marketplaces such as Wayfair and Amazon.

In absence of semantic search our advise to brands is to make sure that eTailer's include the most important keywords in product descriptions, title and specifications. Since this information is usually included in all eTailer's search indexes this can increase the chances of consumers discovering your product and hence boosting visibility.

By working ambitiously with the right keywords for your products at eTailer's you also increase the chances that Google Search (and AI-assistants) will send consumers in the discovery phase to your product listings at eTailer's.

4. Product recommendations

On product detail pages you almost always find a product carrousel called “discover similar products” or “Products related to this item”. Having your product appearing on similar competing products from other brands can be really powerful and drive consumers in the discovery phase to recognise your products.

5. Banner ads

Different form of banner ads for a brand or a specific product is still quite rare within the furniture and design industry in Europe but it’s gaining in popularity. This can obviously be very powerful if a user visit an eTailer looking for a pendel lamp for their kitchen sees your brand while browsing around.

Strategies to boost your brands visibility at eTailer’s

The most successful brands in furniture & design today are actively working with their eTailer’s to boost their products visibility in at least category and home pages. The first step in this process is to make sure your products are presented in the most optimal way and being shown on all the relevant categories. This requires you as a brand to conduct an eTailer audit and find instances where your products presentation needs improvement. We have seen countless of examples where one brands best selling product at one eTailer sold almost nothing at another due to too few or old images. Fixing issues like this will make your products organically sell more and increase in the category ranks to get you to the all so important first few category pages.

Aside from perfecting the presentation of your products at eTailer’s in order to increase visibility you need to have a productive dialogue with your eTailer’s. If you have a tiered partnership approach where the eTailer’s in the top tier gets to for example run exclusive campaigns or get access to certain high-demand products then you are in a great position to negotiate for placement on the homepage for example. If you haven’t gotten as far in formalising a tiered eTailer partnership program you can ask that in return for the eTailer getting to run a campaign with you that they front your brand and a link to your brand page on their home page for the duration of the campaign. The same goes for asking your eTailer to boost your products position in the eTailer’s categories.

Paid reach & visibilty at eTailer’s

Quick history

In the last couple of years online retailer’s with razor thin margins have woken up to the idea of selling retailer media or premium placement on their website. The online retailer which pioneered this (along with so many other things in e-commerce) was Amazon. In 2023 Amazon made almost $47bn (source) in high margin advertising revenue. To put this into proportions, the analyst Benedict Evans estimated in 2023 that Amazon’s revenue business had surpassed “the entire (now much reduced) global newspaper industry” (source):

Retailer paid media adoption in Europe 2024

Just like with almost all of Amazon’s e-commerce inventions over the years they reach Europes more fragmented eTailer landscape. Within the furniture and design industry we see retailer media occasionally but it’s not at all as common as in beauty for example. We spoke with one CEO of a high growth nordic beauty company last week who said that their team get bombarded with at least one call per day from online pharmacies trying to pitch paid retailer media campaigns.

Given the incredibly high incentives online retailer’s in Europe has to sell retailer media in premium placings the industry expectation is that this phenomenon quickly will spread to all sectors within e-commerce. In the meantime there is a big opportunity for the brands that experiment with conducting these campaigns and learns the new medium while the costs are cheaper.

How to measure your brands visibility at your eTailer's

Whether you're engaged in a tiered partnership strategy, investing in eTailer media, or just beginning to audit your eTailer's with the aim of organically improving your products' rankings across categories, it's crucial to systematically measure and track changes over time. Managing this for over 50 products and multiple eTailer's without a specialised tool can be a daunting task. This is precisely where Loupe comes into play, offering the necessary support to navigate these complexities effectively.

With our AI-powered analytics dashboard you will find all the KPI’s you need in order to track and improve the visibility of your products at eTailer’s to increase sales. You are both able to track progress on individual products as well as finding overview charts. Here is one example of a very powerful way to analyse your brands dominance in a specific category at your online retailer:

On the far left, we observe that Flos dominates one of the main lamp categories at Ambientedirect, with 40% of the top 10 products attributed to Flos, despite constituting only 5.36% of the total products in that category. This positioning affords Flos a significant advantage, especially among consumers in the discovery phase searching for pendant lamps, who are promptly introduced to Flos as a leading brand in this space.

Another important overview that was requested from many of our customers is to be able to see your brand’s share of one of your eTailer’s homepage in comparison to other brands. In the below graph we are able to see the brand share of each brand at Finnish Design Shop’s homepage:

This graph is counting number of mentions of the all so important brand page as well as number of mentions of individual product pages from the different brands. In this graph it’s very clear that the Finns are really pushing their own brands with Marimekko, Ittala and Artek having the strongest presence. Loupe’s existing customer HAY is present with mentions of both products and their brand page, albeit small in comparison to some of the Finnish competitors.

Our customers utilize this graph to monitor trends and shifts over time. For instance, if you represent Louis Poulsen and are planning a campaign with Finnish Design Shop, this graph allows you to easily verify whether your request for enhanced visibility on the homepage throughout the campaign has been fulfilled.

Learn more

Thank you for making it this far. As you can tell, we are passionate over our mission to help iconic furniture & design brands to scale their retailer networks. This is but a small selection of how to work with visibility in Loupe. Please reach out to us directly here if you want to learn more.