Welcome Home America Gifts provides quality marketing tools, supplies, and resident move-in gifts for the Multifamily Housing Industry. It is a one-stop shop for follow-up cards, signs, banners, seasonal promotional items, flags, grounds maintenance supplies and resident retention gifts. They have one of the largest selections of balloons in their industry. With 2,500 delightful items to choose from, Welcome Home America Gifts delivers marketing items to apartment managers across the United States.

Welcome Home America (WHA) has been using a website since 1998 for a secondary sales channel with a full color catalog being its primary channel. Their old website was comprehensive and updated regularly in a tedious time consuming method, however, it was not well organized and products were not searchable or easily viewed so the shopping experience was not positive. WHA had no procedure in place to collect website traffic stats or client sales tracking like repeat sales from the internet for example. Most clients were on terms and maybe 1% of their sales were on credit cards, so cash flow was on a net 30 turn. Products were not showcased easily and web shopper would not spend the time necessary to find discounted or close out items. There was no way to up-sell items. Ordering via the website still involved human interaction, so this was a barrier for some shoppers who wanted to complete the ordering online and have instant notification that the order was processed.

SPHEREXX SOLUTION - We started the project with a client interview that helps us truly identify the problems and barriers that was preventing this client from maximizing the sales potential of their website. An ecommerce programming strategy was designed to accomplish these goals:

1. User friendly shopping experience that will increase internet sales

 
2. Add the functionality of up-selling products that compliment or enhance what the customer already has in their shopping cart

 
3. Add a powerful search engine inside the website that would allow customers to search on any keyword (from balloons to flags to seasonal items

 
4. Add tracking so that every search and every sale is monitored which will give WHA statistics to focus their product line around what is selling and what is not selling.

 
5. Streamline the checkout process so that new and returning customers could process their terms or credit card orders quickly and easily.

 
6. Build tools to allow WHA to easily upload products, descriptions, pricing and images in multiple sizes so the shopper could see the product enlarged for details.

 
7. Design a bulk discount pricing formula so that shoppers can know instantly what discounts are available for quantity purchases.

 
8. Design a seamless ordering process to allow shoppers to customize their products and see the product with the customized message and/or colors before placing the order. This reduced “returns” by customers because they controlled the customizing and could proof their own work in advance.

 
9. Build user friendly content management that the client will be able to control without needing any computer experience. Will need a very simple interface to allow the client to add/edit/delete content on every page.

Then we worked with the various departments from the art department to the accounting department to streamline the ordering process.

RESULTS - In 2004, WHA was getting about 2 to 5 orders from the internet per day. In the 2nd qtr 2007, WHA’s internet orders were averaging 12 per day with larger volume. The average daily units sold more than doubled since the new website in March 2007. WHA’s sales growth increased 145.38% in April 2007, 122.30% in May 2007, 87.35% in June 2007 and 189.41% in July 2007.

Cathy Slone with Welcome Home America says this:

"Our new website developed by Spherexx.com is not just easy to use, it is organized so that our customers can quickly find our products. We are delighted with its success."

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