Rainbow Appliance Case Study

Order data shows over 17% conversion rate with IMshopping!
Rainbow Appliance started online in 2006 and currently sells over 8,000 products ranging from refrigerators to BBQ grills. The company has been growing steadily and is beginning to compete with some of the larger big box retailers for business due to greater awareness of their brand, superior service and excellent SEO.

Phone support went only so far…
Prior to working with IMshopping, Rainbow Appliance had relied on phone support exclusively. In practice, they found certain types of questions were not good for the phone. For example: questions about comparing products or recommending a good dishwasher to buy. Additionally, each call took considerable amount of time and resources to maintain and reps found themselves answering the same questions again and again.

Leveraging community answers for customers and SEO
Rainbow Appliance added IMshopping’s Merchant Answers to their site enabling customers to ask shopping questions on any page on the site through an easy to use hosted widget. The company also hired a number of IMshopping community shopping guides to answer questions on their behalf. Each customer who asked a question received a personal response from an experienced shopping guide as well as clickable product recommendations embedded in the answer.

17% conversion rate and page one of search results!
After analyzing order data from four weeks of questions and answers, the company found that 17% of customers who asked a question ended up purchasing.

In addition to the uptick in conversions, Rainbow Appliance saw an increase in organic traffic since all questions and answers were hosted in a heavily search-engine indexed micro site. In fact, many queries that used to tie up the phones like “what is a good microwave to buy” were now on the 1st page of Google results.

As a result of adding a shopping community to their site, Rainbow Appliance had better than expected Q3 sales. The company is looking forward to a terrific Q4 and has already recommended IMshopping to other merchants to boost their Holiday efforts.