Wayfair

The Wayfair App's Navigation Tools And Product Pages Are Clean And Straightforward To Streamline The Buying Experience

Wayfair is a top online destination for home furnishings, offering just about everything a customer could need to design and outfit their house or apartment. From furniture to patio storage and more, Wayfair is an e-commerce brand that can connect you with hundreds of thousands of products that will fit your needs.

It’s an online brand, with a digital destination that is comprehensive, powerful and robust. And even its app platform packs a punch.

The Wayfair mobile app is a handy shopping companion offering a robust ecommerce experience, as well as many enticing extras. It’s everything that the website is and more, creating a more well-rounded experience that users can’t help but enjoy.

From an e-commerce perspective, the app is designed with an intuitive navigation that includes both textual and visual cues. Product category pages feature large, clear images as well as a host of useful product info, including item name, brand name, price, shipping times (where available) and average product rating.

These robust product listings save the user time during the browsing process and create greater satisfaction with the results that are selected. Similarly, product pages feature large imagery and large, readable text. This design element lets mobile app designers prioritize user experience by ensuring that key information is easily visible and accessible.

The “View in Room” feature takes advantage of the camera to overlay an image of the product with what’s being viewed through the camera.

There is a simplicity to the straightforward menu bar that lines the bottom of the screen. And even though there are plenty of options to choose from — from bedroom and living room furniture to bathroom fixtures, outside decor and more — you don’t feel overwhelmed by the options thanks to the drop-down menus and extensive sort and filter options.

Each section of the app is clearly defined. Users know where to go if they want to browse, search for specific items, peruse the sale or check out your saved products.

And this simple, straightforward layout and navigation process ensures that users have a peaceful experience from start to finish.

The Mobile App's Intuitive Sections Help Users Create The Home Of Their Dreams

It’s not just the sleek, modern and straightforward layout and organizational structure that turns heads and makes for a powerful, app-based e-commerce experience. But it is also the intuitive nature of the brand itself and their dedication to infusing robust categories and sections into their app that makes it stand out.

This isn’t just an e-commerce app, but a mobile destination where consumers can craft their own experience based on what their needs are at the time

A dedicated sales section ensures that users are incentivized to return to the app frequently in order to access limited-time deals and promotions. The app collects all the sales in a single place and makes them easy for users to browse as starting points for discovery.

And this section is clearly displayed, getting its own spot on the menu bar so that consumers don’t have to go searching through the app to find the deals, sales and specials that are really encouraging them to buy.

Users can also register for a Wayfair account in order to unlock the ability to create inspiration boards from products found in the app. This adds a social media-like aspect to the design that lets users come to it to make their own boards to look at later.

Similarly, an inspiration section actually lets users see rooms and setups marked with the Wayfair products that match. This makes it even more efficient and fun for users to find the products that match their own personal style because they also give them the ability to see how these products look in place.

An interactive “View In Room” feature also adds a kind of virtual reality aspect to the design and lets consumer see how products could potentially look in their space.

This app is ahead of its time and provides users with an experience that isn’t just for e-commerce, but for inspiration and enlightenment.

Wayfair Ensures Customers Recieve The Same Experience On Its Mobile Platform As On Its Website

The design of the Wayfair app is seamlessly aligned with its web properties and overall branding. While backgrounds are done in white and cream palettes, purple and teal accent colors, as well as tons of product and lifestyle photography keep the app feeling fresh and inspiring.

It’s a modern platform that matches the modern website. But it’s not just the physical features that are cohesive and consistent. 

Consistency in visual language – that's what branding experts always strive for. It creates a strong and memorable presence, allowing users to recognize the brand regardless of the platform they encounter.

The overall feel of the design and its dedication to helping consumers find the right products with ease is transferred from desktop to app in a serene and stunning way — it’s this user experience that is equally enchanting and consistent with the Wayfair brand.

What Is Wayfair?

Wayfair is an American e-commerce brand that’s in the business of selling home goods from decor to furniture to fixtures. The brand was founded in 2002 and has grown to be one of the biggest sellers of home decor goods, selling over 10 million products from 10,000 suppliers.

The brand was formerly known as CSN stores and was founded in Boston, Massachusetts. But the brand has warehouses across the globe, in the United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland and the UK.

Founders Niraj Shah and Steve Conine met at Cornell University, but Wayfair wasn’t their first business venture. The two are the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer respectively.

What started as a company selling patio furniture and storage supplies turned into an organization that sells a large variety of products for the home at affordable prices. Its catalog expansion in 2016 led to an explosion in sales with the company earning over $100 million.

Here’s the full Wayfair story:

In 2002, the duo founded Wayfair on a shoestring budget in a spare bedroom of Steve's house. By carefully analyzing Internet search patterns and results, Steve and Niraj recognized a market opportunity to sell stereo racks and stands online. What would grow to become the largest ecommerce destination for home furnishings and décor started with just one single website and soon grew to more than 250 standalone sites selling everything from barstools to birdhouses. In 2011, Steve and Niraj took a giant leap and moved all of their e-commerce sites into one mega destination for the home and named it Wayfair. By the next year, Wayfair had exceeded $600 million in annual revenue and was well on its way to becoming a household name offering millions of products across a wide array of styles and price points. Wayfair generated $5.7 billion in net revenue for the twelve months ended June 30, 2018.

Wayfair is dedicated to providing its consumers with the products they need at the prices they can afford. And their robust offering is as easy to access on their desktop platform as it is on their app. In fact, the comprehensive app might be even more efficient to peruse.

And that’s exactly what brands want their consumers to think.

Wayfair’s Innovative App Is Here To Stay

E-commerce brands can learn a lot from Wayfair and their cohesive app platform. It’s a fully-functioning design that works just as efficiently as their online platform, making it easy for a consumer to buy the home decor items they need wherever and whenever they want.

The app keeps branding consistent with a similar color palette, straightforward typography and product imagery that matches those on the website. Even the clever pricing icons sit on these images to let consumers know how discounted the products are.

This ensures that the consumers have the same experience across platforms and mediums, and is a technique used in omnichannel marketing to ensure that users can start a purchase in one place and finish it in another with ease.

Similarly, the comprehensive nature of this app matches that of the desktop, but at no point do users feel overwhelmed or anxious. In fact, the comprehensiveness actually adds to the overall experience and guides users organically throughout the app.

There is also the addition of some very innovative sections that call to the branding and its modern backbone. These sections also show users that the brand innately understands its audience.

An inspiration section shows users showrooms with specific decor marked. This decor is then shown beneath in a variety of product grids so that users can have immediate access to the products that inspire them.

And a “Sales” section gets its module on the menu bar so that users don’t have to go searching for the discounted prices that they are seeking out initially. Wayfair knows that its consumers want to get the most for their dollar and providing them with direct access to the sales section streamlines their journey.

Add this to the streamlined layout and straightforward navigation in the form of extensive menu bars and filtering systems, and you have an e-commerce app that streamlines the buyer’s journey and encourages users to make a purchase.

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