Industry Eye: Case Study - Carpet One Covers 
All With Its Move Online

Problem: Carpet One Floor & Home, a retailer of floor coverings, lacked a web presence for its 1,000-plus individually owned retail locations.

Solution: Contracted with an e-commerce technology and services provider to host its website.

Results: ROI of $10 for every $1 spent online, cost per sale online is half of tradit-
ional media and the average order generated online is 50 percent greater than retail-
only customers.

Already fully imm-
ersed in store retailing with more than 1,000 independently owned franchise stores, Carpet One Floor & Home needed to grow online. The floor coverings retailer, owned by CCA Global Partners, was missing out on the revenue and increased brand exposure a site creates — both in sales and traffic it might drive to retail stores.

So in spring 2008, Carpet One hired Blueport Commerce, an e-commerce 
technology and services provider that specializes in working with retail chains, to develop template websites for their individual franchises. Franchisees would be able to customize the site to their own stores' specifications in terms of pricing, product offerings, etc. The microsites launched in June.

"In today's environment, you want to have as many opportunities to face the customer as you can," says Dean Marcarelli, chief marketing officer for CCA Global Partners. "With a robust user experience, we'd not only attract people from the web to the store, but we'd be able to get customers we don't have in a couple of different areas: shop at home and leads generated online. We wanted that rich user experience to cover those two missing parts of the business."

Unique to Each
To overcome the challenge of creating a website for a brand owned by multiple independent dealers, Blueport Commerce provided each Carpet One location with essentially two websites: one with their own unique URL (e.g., smithscarpetone.com), and the corporate Carpet One site. Carpet One's corporate staff did the majority of the "heavy lifting" in developing both sites — implementing the technology, loading the product catalog and setting up the marketing options. In both cases, the sites are customizable to the individual members.

"They have the best of both worlds," says Carl Prindle, president/CEO of Blueport Commerce, of Carpet One members. "They have their own URLs and sites that they can promote in their local TV, print and online marketing as they see fit. Also, the parent company
invests in promoting the Carpet One brand 
across all its members."

The individual microsites serve to reflect the localization of the Carpet One brand, which is critical to selling "big-ticket" items online. The "About Us" sections, for example, are customized by the individual dealers to connect with their local communities. Visitors to the corporate site are prompted
to enter their ZIP codes to find the local store near them. Then they're taken to that store's microsite.

Lead Generation Tool
Carpet One immediately saw a substantial increase in the number of qualified leads it was generating, both in stores and online.

While unwilling to provide exact figures, Marcarelli says conversion rates are trending higher than e-commerce sites that sell smaller-ticket items. The return on investment the online sites are providing prove them to be wise investments: For every $1 Carpet One spends online, it's getting $10 in return. Cost per sale online is roughly half of what it is with traditional media, Marcarelli adds.

What's more, Carpet One's online customers — both those who buy online as well as those who research products online before coming into the stores to make purchases — are spending about 50 percent more money than their retail-only counterparts.