More product information has led to more web visitors, more conversions and more sales, said Jon Gobeli, Vice President of Digital Commerce at City Furniture.
Consumers can take months to select a piece of furniture, as it is a high-ticket product that consumers use daily for years. To that end, City Furniture wants to ensure shoppers have as much product information on the product detail page that they need to be confident in their purchase.
“The product detail page is the No. 1 page where customers are coming after consideration of having City Furniture as a retailer,” Gobeli said. “It is the No. 1 touchpoint where they are researching and trying to learn more about our products.”
City Furniture first opened in 1972 and now operates 25 retail stores and sells 50,000 SKUs online. The retailer’s ecommerce store uses many legacy systems that the brand has been updating over time. One of the systems City Furniture updated is the product information management platform, known as a “PIM system,” to Akeneo’s platform.
City Furniture Increases Conversion
In the past few years, City Furniture has expanded the number of “attributable fields” for its products in the PIM to 900, up from its previous 300 fields. An attributable field is anything from a product color, dimension or fabric type, or something more complex, such as “good for back sleepers” for its mattresses. The commerce team can then use these attributes to make the product pages more detailed, such as adding a relevant filter or product call out. Gobeli estimates its product pages are now 50% longer with the added information.
“The real business focus for [the commerce and merchandising teams] is to understand how can we better drive value out of the product data that we have today and relating that back into web experiences,” Gobeli said. “All that’s starting from really the product data, maintaining what we currently have and understanding what are strategic attributes that we need to expand into more to be able to drive more of a web experience.”
The added product detail information has increased shopper confidence, as City Furniture’s conversion rate for products in a customer’s cart has increased 13% since this change, which greatly increases its digital revenue, Gobeli said.
“Customers will build that cart and somehow get to a point where they have a little bit of hesitation,” he said. “We always want to make sure we take out that friction and be able to give it the highest amount of confidence we can for a person to feel good about making that purchase online rather than having them feel that they need to go into a retail showroom to be able to validate those product qualities.”
Organic Search Traffic Bump
Beyond spurring sales, the added product detail information also helps attract more shoppers to CityFurniture.com. The brand has had a “modest lift” in traffic to its website from organic search, which is roughly 15% of its web traffic. Gobeli attributes the lift in traffic to the increased product data. While many brands have thousands of product pages, if a shopper finds a page valuable by spending time on it, clicking add to cart and then converting, Google will recognize that and increase that web page’s authority and increase its ranking, he said.
We’ve seen challenges in a lot of other digital channels for 2025, but our investment in product data has really helped us drive the organic search portion,” Gobeli said.
In addition, City Furniture has beefed up its on-site blogs, which also contributes to the bump in organic search traffic, Gobeli said. The brand focuses each blog on a customer problem and then it will mine its product data for furniture to feature that will solve that problem. The blogs then help drive traffic to its site, and then feature active products, he said.
Paid search, however, has been more of a challenging marketing channel recently, as the costs continue to rise making it harder to hit its return goals, he said.
Preparing for AI Search Shift
The furniture retailer also is working to capture more traffic from consumers using generative AI search platforms, like ChatGPT. The retailer knows from its analytics sources that 29% of its shoppers also use ChatGPT, he said. This is a high cross over, which he expects will only increase.
To capture those shoppers, City Furniture changed its backend to the open-source AI protocol (Model Context Protocol) to ensure any AI can read, scrape and capture all of the data the retailer has, and the data is laid out in a logical way the AI can understand. City Furniture needs to tie in all relevant product data, such as if the item is sold out or if its available to ship to a certain ZIP code.
Benefits for the Marketing Team
City Furniture can also use these product attributes to sort the furniture into collections and have reporting on them. For example, City Furniture could tag a couch as “Miami Modern” and then look at the sales over the past five years of all Miami Modern furniture. The marketing team can access the information to find products they want to feature for a campaign, without needing to regularly meet with the merchandising team.
“We also use these fields to help the marketers understand when they’re trying to do their storytelling online, that we’re able to filter into these stories and also bring this information into not only their product selection but also what they’re using for understanding the qualities of the product beyond just simple product description,” Gobeli said.