One of the largest Russian retailers of furniture and home accessories with 59 stores across the country in various formats: hypermarkets, mini hypermarkets and smaller sized shops. Its online store has over 5 million visitors on a monthly basis, who generate almost 50% of the company’s overall sales. Hoff’s strategic focus is to provide the ultimate customer experience across all customer touchpoints.

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Until recently, online furniture sales constituted only about 10% of the overall market share. After the pandemic, this has started to change dramatically, but customers still experience a lot of challenges when buying furniture or home decor items online. One of them is the responsibility of making the purchase decision. In physical shops, this responsibility is usually shared among family members as they go to the shop together, and it is significantly reduced by a professional shop assistant, who helps customers make the best choice based on their specific needs and expectations. Giant furniture brand Hoff wanted to replicate this experience online despite the fact that it was a very difficult and ambitious goal.

Hoff launched live video sales in September 2020, gradually connecting all of their furniture assortment to the eyezon service. The brand introduced its online customers the truly exciting experience of buying furniture live, not only with the help of professional sales assistants, but also together with those whose opinion matters the most. With the co-op feature, online customers can invite up to 5 family members or friends to enjoy live video shopping together and make a purchase decision, which will make everybody happy. At first, the company connected 140 streamers to the service, who hosted on a monthly basis 2,000-3,000 live video streams from 7 hypermarkets with the largest product stocks. As the company was rolling out the service, it tested different button names. For instance, to encourage customers to be more active, the company renamed the button from “see online” to “video consultation”. After 2 weeks of testing, the results showed that the number of button clicks and therefore sales conversions decreased by 2x. So the company returned to the original button name. To better engage online customers with live video shopping, Hoff enabled another eyezon feature, a welcome video. It is integrated in the pop-up query window of the widget and helps to better prepare online customers for the new experience of live video shopping. Live shopping experiences are available daily from 10 am until 10 pm. In 2021, Hoff changed its approach with streamers, building a separate team of sales assistants who are fully dedicated to providing live video shopping experiences to online customers streaming from 1 hypermarket.

Online customers demonstrate great interest in live video shopping, as the “see online” button gets over 50k clicks on a monthly basis. The average duration of a live stream is 1.24 minutes, which means that customers are mostly curious about receiving answers for the specific questions that they already had. An additional feature of inviting friends and family to shop together makes it easier to make an online purchase decision for a big-ticket item.  

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