Creating A Great Commerce Experience

I'm Alon, Co-Founder of Houzz. My name is Guy.

I lead the mobile development at Houzz. When we got started, the best advice that we got was that we should focus first on the user experience and build that out until we really provide an amazing value to the community, and then monetization sort of follows organically at that point.

And that's what we did. So we spent the first few years really optimizing the experience, creating the best experience for homeowners and for the professionals. One of the things that are unique about the Houzz experience -- it's not a in-your-face shop.

It's something that lets the user learn and educate himself about design and design trends. At some point, you need to make a decision that you're going to, you know, turn on the ignition and start monetizing. We were very lucky in that regard.

We had great feedback from the community on what are the things that they wanted. So we followed those things and focused the monetization on solving those problems that the community had. So we created our local program. It's a local subscription program for home professionals -- architects, contractors, landscapers, et cetera. The second monetization channel that we started more recently is our marketplace. It's a commerce platform that lets homeowners find anything for their home, from sofas, to lighting, to vanities, et cetera. And that also came because we started getting phone calls to the office from homeowners that wanted to, oh, I just want to buy this sofa or this bathtub that I see in the picture. And we kept sending them to stores to buy it, but, really, no. We want to buy it on Houzz. Where is the Add to Cart button? So we created an Add to Cart button. We constantly monitor and talk to people who shop, both the ones who end up buying and the ones who don't, and try to get feedback from them. What worked? What didn't work well? A lot of people wanted to visualize what that product would look like in their room, and so we ended up creating the View in My Room feature, where you can take five million products and see what they look like in your home. People who use this feature end up buying a lot more.

The Houzz app helped grow the business by exposing us to a different user base and the website. Users on mobile are much more engaged, are much more returning to the app, and are much more dedicated to the Houzz experience. When we introduced Apple Pay, we also introduced a Quick Checkout feature that allows people basically to skip the card. You don't need to fill in your details because they're already pre-filled in with Apple Pay, and that's it. So basically, it really reduced the obstacle or the hurdle to converting a user to a buying user. Think about the experience that you bring to your users and give them a lot of reasons to return to your app.

After you do that, introducing e-commerce to the app is easy. I remember for many years reading stories about how other companies got started and trying to understand what is the secret sauce that goes into it. When you look at it from the outside, it always looks like magic.

What you don't see is all the hard work behind the scenes, all of the failures, all the things that didn't work as well. That's kind of the big magic, really, at the end of the day is when things don't work out the way you want it. You just continue to work on it until they do. Try to do things that are different.

Try to see exactly what is it that people need and fill the solution for what they need. And don't try to build something that, you know, you've seen others build already. Try to build it differently. Try to build it in the way that would really solve the problem that the users are having.