Case Study: Increasing conversion rates with personalization

How Australia's #1 furniture e-tailer used Barilliance to Increase Sales


Brought to you by Fantastic Furniture & Barilliance

Meet Fantastic Furniture

25 years ago, Fantastic Furniture opened as a single stall at Sydney's Parklea Markets. Today, this eCommerce powerhouse has become one of Australia's largest furniture and bedding manufacturers and retailers.

Fantastic Furniture sells 1,000's of products. This provides an incredible opportunity and challenge.

The opportunity is matching each customer with a variety of great products. The challenge is how to do this across 1,000's of products and unlimited customers.

The Challenges

Fantastic Furniture identified three major areas of improvement to convert more visitors into clients.


1. Site Usability - With a massive catalogue of products, it was a challenge to pair effective, relevant offers to the individual customers.

2. On-site Personalization - Certain offers Fantastic Furniture wanted to give were restricted by location. Certain stores had promotions that others did not.

3. Cart Abandonment - Like all eCommerce retail stores, cart abandonment was a serious challenge. Fantastic Furniture needed a way to tie session data to an individual customer, and compel them to complete their purchase.

The Solutions

Fantastic Furniture identified four levers to increase revenues.


1. Personalized Recommendations - Improve site usability with accurate cross-sales, up-sales, and general navigation through specific, smart recommendations.

2. On-site Personalization - Customize site content based on customer demographics (such as where they were shopping from) and customer behavior.

3. Increase Social Proof - Maximize conversions through live data, relevant to the products being viewed. 

4. Cart Abandonment - Create a compelling cart recovery campaign to recover lost sales.

Improving Site Usability with Product Recommendations

Using Barilliance Fantastic Furniture were able to present their site users with relevant, highly curated product recommendations.  To maximize results, recommendations go beyond single session data.

Barilliance aggregates data collected from all users. This allows Fantastic Furniture to understand which categories are most often looked at, as well identify the highest converting cross-sales. 

Today, product recommendation directly contribute to increased sales . As Leigh McKnight explains, "Our average order values have increased year on year".  Together, these improvements have resulted in a massive increase in conversions.


Our latest study on product recommendations showed that customers who engage with Barilliance recommendations add (on average) 3.9 items to their cart compared to 2.21 items from those who did not. Even more impressive, product recommendations improved conversion rates by 320%.


Our data also shows that customers who engage with the product recommendations convert over three times as those who don't. 

"Our average order values have increased by 10% year on year."

Increasing Relevancy with On-Site Personalization

Fantastic Furniture serves thousands of unique customers.

Creating personal, relevant experiences for each visitor requires more than accurate product recommendations. To solve this challenge, they selected Barilliance Onsite Personalization tool. This software can be used to tailor webpages to specific customer segments.

One example is shipping. 

In Sydney, Fantastic Furniture is able to provide free shipping for orders over $49. 

Fantastic Furniture personalizes the webpage to display this offer to shoppers from this area. Below is a screenshot of how the homepage appears to customers who are located in the Sydney area.  Notice the free shipping offer for orders over $49.

Visitors from Sydney see this version of the website.

​Visitors from outside of Sydney see this version of the website.

With Onsite-Personalization, Fantastic Furniture is able to tailor the customer experience in a multitude of ways. While this example shares how they are making specific offers based on demographic segmentation, they can also tailor offers based on previous sessions, past purchases, and more. 

For example, optimizing the UX to fit the screen size is mandatory today. Barilliance does this automatically. 


Vicky Dragatsis, Digital Marketing Manager, explains their approach.

“Not all website users are created equal, we strive to deliver the most relevant content to that user whether it be Onsite Personalization and Recommendations, or retargeting emails after the customer has left the site, the Barilliance solution allows us to do this automatically and on the fly.” 

“We are continually trying to improve our customer's journey by providing a personalised experience by leveraging the rules and intelligence available in the Barilliance platform. “

Leveraging Social Proof with Live!

Barilliance Live! uses real time, dynamic notifications to increase sales.

A few ways that Fantastic Furniture uses these notifications include showing how many other people purchased the item in the last 24 hours, or even that the last purchase from their city was x minutes ago.

These messages are crafted to instill a sense of security, social proof, and urgency with clients. Visitors complete more purchases when exposed to Live! messages. 

Recovering Sales with Cart Abandonment Emails

Lastly, to maximize conversions Fantastic Furniture built a cart abandonment campaign. While we can't share exact numbers from Fantastic Furniture with you, the average Barilliance customer recovers $24 for every $1 invested in cart abandonment campaigns. 

One overlooked key to success in increasing your email opt-in rate.

You can't send recovery emails if you are unable to identify the customer and have a way to contact them. Fantastic Furniture leverages Barilliance Email Booster to recognize returning customers (even if they do not log in), allowing them to maximize recovered sales. 

“The revenue we’ve recovered from this campaign has yielded a huge ROI for us”  -  Leigh McKnight, Head of Digital, Fantastic Furniture

Conclusion: Personalization Matters

By pooling data across users such as which products are often bought together, or are compared against each other, you can make predictive, personal offers with a high chance of success.


Fantastic Furniture used Barilliance's technology to do this and more. They created rules within Barilliance to tailor offers based on customer's past purchases and location. 


If you want to learn more about Barilliance, schedule a free demo here.