Business

TheFurniture.com is a leading online furniture retailer offering a wide array of high- quality, stylish furniture and design options at competitive prices. The company has 18 full-time and 18 part-time employees and works with more than 100furniture manufacturers. Keeping up with rapid growth – revenues have jumped more than 630 percent over the last two years – is a daily challenge.

Approach

Alex Spektor, Chief Executive Officer, and Alex Dikman, Chief Operating Officer, acknowledge that Google products are critical to their success. They advertise through Google AdWords™. They also use Google Sitemaps to automatically direct the Google crawler to content that is new in order to provide fresher results for people searching topics Google.com. And, they use Google Base, which enables them to easily submit all types of online and offline content that Google will host and make searchable. "Our business is 100 percent online, so we rely heavily on Google to help people find and learn about our products," says Spektor.

When Spektor and Dikman heard about Google Checkout, they knew it would be another useful tool from Google and an effective way to increase revenue from their site while reducing costs. Checkout helps customers purchase quickly and securely using a single username and password. It also works together with AdWords through the Google Checkout badge – a small shopping cart icon that Checkout merchants can place on their AdWords ads. This makes it easier for shoppers to find TheFurniture.com through Google search. Equally advantageous, Google picks up the tab for transactions processed through Checkout based on TheFurniture.com's AdWords spend.

Results

	"We operate on small margins, so anything that lowers our costs is a bonus. Our message to all our competitors is, ‘Don't use Google Checkout. Leave it for us.'"

After getting started with Google Checkout, TheFurniture.com realized several positive outcomes. The Checkout badge on AdWords ads made the company's ads more visible. As a result, even when the ads appeared lower on the Google search page, more people clicked on them. "We drove the same amount of traffic at reduced costs, because the Checkout badge made our ads stand out," explains Dikman.

People who subsequently landed on TheFurniture.com were also more likely to buy. Sales grew 5 percent after the company began using Checkout – a percentage that Spektor and Dikman say has made a significant impact on their business. Customers readily adopted the Checkout service and phoned TheFurniture.com saying that Checkout made them feel more confident and secure when shopping online.

Before getting started with Checkout, TheFurnture.com was offering other alternative payment methods on their site. Customers used these other forms of payment 3 to 4 percent of the time. Within the first 3 weeks, Checkout garnered 8 to 12 percent of customers' online purchases. Because Google pays for transaction processing on these purchases, the company is saving 3 percent overall on processing fees. TheFurniture.com passes along the savings to customers by giving them a 3 percent discount whenever they use the Checkout service, which, in turn, is helping to increase business.

"By using Google AdWords and Checkout together, our AdWords ads are more visible due to the Checkout badge, yet we pay less on transaction processing," notes Spektor. "We operate on small margins, so anything that lowers our costs is a bonus. Our message to all our competitors is, ‘Don't use Google Checkout. Leave it for us.'"