How Decor Outdoor Rebuilt After Google Erased Its Organic Traffic | EP. #245

Bill Ferris 00:03
SEO is constantly changing, and it's just a nightmare trying to chase it. You try to do your best and cover the bare bones.

Narrator 00:10
Welcome to the E-comm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!

Andrew Maff 00:25
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the E-comm Show. As usual, I am your host Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Bill Ferris, president over at Decor Outdoor. Bill, how are you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show?

Bill Ferris 00:37
Oh yeah, ready to go.

Andrew Maff 00:39
Sweet, I'm actually super excited to have you on the show. Earlier this year I did a bit of a remodel, redid a deck, and had to furnish the whole thing — I learned a lot about this industry doing that. So I'm very interested to have this conversation with you. But I always like starting these off pretty typically — I want to give you the floor. Tell us a little about how you got started with Decor Outdoor, a bit about your background, and we'll go from there.

Bill Ferris 01:08
Sure. The nuts and bolts of it are, I come from a consumer products background — I used to work for Coca-Cola in brand management in Atlanta back in the day, then worked for some internet trading companies. A friend of mine in Chicago who worked in logistics approached me one day and said, "hey, I've talked with a lot of the manufacturers we work with — lighting, mirrors, and such — and they've told me there's a big opportunity in e-commerce." Since he was focused on the logistics and customer service side, and knew I came from a marketing background with some design work and technical know-how, it seemed like a good marriage to launch a business. So, in addition to a million different things I was doing on a marketing consulting basis, we decided we'd launch our business.

Bill Ferris 02:06
Originally, it was Decor Interiors, and like I said, we focused on the brands and product categories he was already familiar with. We made some terrible mistakes with awful URL names and such — we quickly learned that was a bit naive on our part — but we launched Decor Interiors back in about 2007. Over the next few months, we quickly learned that lights and mirrors aren't too difficult to sell; they're just difficult to deliver without breakage. So we ended up learning the hard way about some of the pitfalls you don't think about right away — the follow-up, the post-order handling of everything.

Bill Ferris 03:01
But as time went on, my partner left. I continued sparingly working on the business and started to notice a trend — we were selling more outdoor furniture than indoor. Then about six years ago or so, back in 2020-21, I started exploring a shift to all outdoor: rebranded, replatformed, new domain — Decor Outdoor. Got that started back in '21, and it also worked from a strategic standpoint, because outdoor, as opposed to indoor, has fewer competitors carrying some of the luxury lines we carried, and nobody wanted to be on Amazon or these other marketplaces, so some of the margin-draining stuff wasn't a factor there. This shift to outdoor seemed like a smart move — higher price point, kept working with commercial-grade companies so we had less follow-up on damage claims and that sort of thing, and basically started focusing on the high-end brands. And I guess right through the pandemic, we were seeing growth.

Andrew Maff 04:32
Nice. So are you private-labeling anything, or reselling certain brands — kind of a mix of both? What's the approach there?

Bill Ferris 04:41
Back when we were selling indoor things, there were a few brands that wanted us to do our own private labeling, and we did that with some lamp categories as well as rugs. But for outdoor, it's really just selling the manufacturers' brands — we're not doing any private labeling there.

Andrew Maff 05:00
Nice, that makes life a little easier. Do you actually purchase any of that inventory, or is it more of a drop-ship model?

Bill Ferris 05:08
Everything is drop-shipped. So yeah, we're just a virtual storefront — drawing traffic, building the brand, sharing information, and then, obviously, order processing and follow-up with customer service, logistics, and things like that.

Andrew Maff 05:21
Perfect. Let me ask your opinion on this — there's obviously a lot of pros and cons to drop shipping. One issue companies that do a lot of it will point to is that you don't have a lot of control over the customer's experience post-purchase — the actual delivery, whether it shows up on time or not, it becomes your problem regardless. A lot of that gets pushed onto you. Is that the same case in your scenario? Have you found a way to solve for that? Tell me a bit about it.

Bill Ferris 05:55
Well, as a smaller business competing against big names, we try to leverage that personal touch — the ability to streamline the quote process, be responsive to inquiries, set up additional discounts, follow-ups, swatch samples, things like that. Being able to address issues as they come in is probably our best way of dealing with things that are honestly out of our control — whether it's the particular freight company the manufacturer chooses to work with, or the fulfillment ability of the manufacturer or distributor at their warehouse level. And you're hitting the nail on the head with this, from a challenge standpoint, because one of the things — tied into general customer service — is that we're really trying to find ways to build our credibility, trust, and expertise, and our perception in the marketplace, not just with commercial buyers, but with residential too.

Bill Ferris 07:12
We've started integrating and putting a lot more focus on getting ratings and reviews — using Trustpilot, we used Yotpo back in the day, and all sorts of Google rating systems and that stuff. But I feel like Trustpilot is the one that's most recognized, and for the most part it's been a positive experience, because we follow up every order with, hey, there's an email coming from Trustpilot, heads up, we'd appreciate any feedback, and so on — that's been helpful in increasing the response rate.

Bill Ferris 07:53
Coincidentally, as we speak, I'm dealing with a challenge that has nothing to do with us — the manufacturer has slow-walked order processing and followed that up with a lack of communication. So I'm constantly answering phone calls from trade accounts, responding to email inquiries, but with no information on why an order isn't processed, where the tracking information is, or why the tracking information is wrong. Or, worse case, an order comes in incomplete, or with the wrong items shipped. Unfortunately, because of the timing of some of these rating and review requests, we get hammered, with comments like, "it was terrible, it took forever to get the product, and it was wrong." So then we have to do damage control after the fact — either saying, "hey, we'd appreciate if you think back on your actual experience placing the order and the communication from Decor Outdoor, since that's really what this review is about," or acknowledging the other challenges and doing our best to mitigate the issue, offering some incentive or compensation on the back end to try to counteract some of that. But it's a challenge when you don't have that full integration. There are benefits to it, but like you said, you're out of control of it, yet you're still seen as the point of contact — so you end up being the manufacturer, in the customer's eyes, in this particular scenario.

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Andrew Maff 10:10
Yeah, for a product line like yours, I can see how it makes a lot of sense, because these things are so heavy — the logistics of it are a nightmare. The amount of warehouse space you'd need to even have some of that stuff sitting around is ridiculous. They're so big, so heavy, it can be a lot of work. I've seen businesses in similar situations position themselves more like the expert in the field, even though it's not their own product line — almost acting like a pseudo-consultant: "these are the products we suggest you look at," and when the customer makes the purchase, you let them know, "you're buying it through us, and so-and-so is going to ship it to you." That way, you keep an arm's length — if there are any problems, it's because they messed up, essentially. I can see how, especially with patio furniture, that happens a lot. For ours, I don't think we had any major problems, but I do remember it took weeks for everything to actually show up.

Bill Ferris 11:17
It varies by manufacturer, because most of the ones we're carrying these days, whether it's patio furniture or umbrellas, have the base framework of everything, and then a lot of customization happens around the upholstery fabric or the canopy fabric — those pieces get custom-made by order. They don't warehouse inventory of all the different variations. So there's usually a built-in lead time — typically four to six weeks for a lot of umbrella manufacturers just to get those things produced. Some of them may have inventory, but with a much narrower selection of fabrics. And then when you get to patio furniture, you can be looking at 14 to 20 weeks, because things are coming from Indonesia, and everyone wants something a bit more custom.

Bill Ferris 12:26
The good thing, I guess, with our new focus on trade accounts, commercial buyers, and interior designers, is that they're familiar with the fact that there are going to be long lead times on things. They've been to trade shows, they've sat in the sofas, so they know if it's comfortable or not, they know what the fabric is like, they're familiar with Sunbrella and a lot of other textile manufacturers. So they build that into their timeline. It's the residential customers, or some of the less experienced commercial buyers, who suddenly find themselves up against a time crunch, and you're like, sorry, yeah, you're going to have to wait. You'll get something you'll really love, and we'll help you through the process.

Andrew Maff 13:18
Are you finding the customer base is mostly businesses, or is it mostly consumers for home use?

Bill Ferris 13:25
It's definitely shifted. Part of our decision, strategically, was to go after the higher end of the market, so from a price-point standpoint, that eliminates a large percentage of typical residential buyers. And so — sorry, I'm trying to think — could you ask that again?

Andrew Maff 13:55
Is your customer base mostly other businesses buying in bulk, or—?

Bill Ferris 14:00
We're shifting from where we began, where we probably had a wider range of price points and more residential customers, toward the higher-end brands — which come with longer warranties, much higher-quality materials and options, and so on. That's shifted us toward more commercial trade-account purchasers, which actually makes it easier on us. We'd rather do a better job serving clients who are going to keep coming back again and again with multiple projects. So that shift is definitely taking place.

Andrew Maff 14:43
Do they tend to be more like hotels, restaurants, that type of thing, or is it more designers working for a higher-end market, kind of helping design someone's massive estate and the management of it?

Bill Ferris 14:59
It's been a mix. We've definitely had a lot more of the builder-architect type coming in for patio umbrellas — and honestly, that's what we sell the most of. The vast majority of our orders are umbrellas and parts. As they get into larger installations, with permanent-mount cantilever umbrellas that might have multiple canopies and all that, we're starting to get involved earlier in the planning process for a more holistic backyard or patio-deck project. If we're working directly for someone repping a residential buyer versus some of the businesses and hotels, we have to play in this middle ground, because anyone with any real size is going to have a direct relationship with the manufacturers to begin with — they don't need us. Manufacturers, for the most part, work directly with commercial buyers, so we can't get too big. On the other side, we can't get too small either, because then they balk at the price, even if they're a corporation or something like that. So we're playing in this middle ground — more boutique hotels, and if we're dealing with any sort of industrial space in an urban setting, you might have things in atriums and parks, and so on. We're definitely working with more and more clients who have the scale but not necessarily the relationship with these manufacturers, because it's not a process they go through frequently.

Andrew Maff 16:49
Yeah, it makes sense. So what's the marketing strategy then, given you've got that mix? I know specifically with higher-price-point, high-ticket items, it's tough to get things moving, but once it does, and you get through that ebbs-and-flows stage, things start flying. So what's your approach to bringing in new customers?

Bill Ferris 17:13
Well, it's certainly changed. I'd say, over the last five years — for the longest time, 90% of our traffic was organic, generated by a number of very in-depth articles we'd carefully researched and published. We were doing all the right things from an SEO standpoint, and that was driving a ton of traffic — we didn't have to worry about bringing folks to the site.

Bill Ferris 17:47
Then there were a few changes made in 2022 by Google that shifted how they were presenting search results on short-tail keywords — under the guise of "helpful content" and purchase or search intent — and that just dried up our organic search almost overnight. They viewed everything we were getting traffic from as informational, but the terms driving that traffic shifted from "we'll show mixed results from any type of page" to "we're only showing transactional or commercial" results.

Bill Ferris 18:28
I know I'm getting a little into the weeds with the SEO stuff, but it sets the groundwork for where we didn't really have to worry about it — we were doing a good job with content marketing, and that was driving all the traffic. Then in 2022, we had to shift our mindset: okay, that's not working the same way, can we find ways to make some of that up? Still doing content marketing, maybe chopping some of the longer articles into smaller pieces so it's a shorter read. SEO is constantly changing, and it's just a nightmare trying to chase it — you try to do your best and cover the bare bones. After a while, we brought in some marketing agencies who specialize in SEO — once we got to the end of our own brain power, asking, okay, what are we not thinking of, we brought them in to come up with some solutions. We also started dabbling a bit more in paid advertising, which brought in some traffic, although I'd argue it's never really done much better than break-even for us. Not sure if it's the price point or the cost per click, but the ROAS just never worked out to where I felt it was a very lucrative venture. But you still have to build brand awareness.

Bill Ferris 19:58
We've dabbled a bit in social media posts and advertising there to try to drive traffic. We've done things in-house on the Google Ads side, and we've had outsourced agencies running things too. We've got a new campaign coming out — maybe we'll roll it out toward the end of the year — that's on Meta, really focused on that target customer, more on the trade-account side. It leverages what we view as our competitive advantage: customer service, and the fact that I've been in this business a long time and will be handling these trade accounts largely myself, setting up online meetings to help flesh out their project needs, get quotes, and things like that. The hope is that, while from a sheer volume-of-traffic standpoint we may never see the same levels we did with those traditional organic search models, we'll be bringing in much more focused and relevant traffic — which, from a profitability standpoint and in terms of recurring business, is going to be much more effective.

Andrew Maff 21:23
Yeah, for a product line like yours, the struggle you run into is you could pretty much do anything and it should work. On Google, there are people actively looking for this type of stuff, so obviously Google Ads would work well, SEO makes a ton of sense. Now the problem is you get a lot of people using AI to ask who they should use, so you've got to make sure you're catering to the AIs and that they start referencing you — which really just means making sure your site is indexable for that. Social media could be fantastic, and influencers could be amazing, but the problem becomes that the only way to actually get them to post about higher-ticket items is to send them product — and that's like, am I going to send someone a $5,000 couch just for them to post about it once? I'm not going to do that. So that's where it becomes about finding that balance to make those things work.

Bill Ferris 22:19
It's a tough nut to crack, and I think one of the mindset shifts I've undergone over the years is to pay less attention to, and get less stressed out about, going down the rabbit hole on every little thing having to do with SEO, traffic, keywords, and all of that — and instead go more from directional information: is this generally moving in the right direction, are we seeing an increase in the type of customers we're looking to gain? Because you only have so much mind space, and you also have to have a life, and it's so easy to go down that rabbit hole and think, well, I want to move from this position to this position on the page. And like you said, with the advent of not just AI search, but even before that, you had the AI summary.

Bill Ferris 23:23
In the good old days, you had organic search results, you showed up on page one, there were a minimal number of ads, and you got a certain click-through rate — then it was all on you to close the deal. Then all of a sudden it's all these ads, so everything gets pushed down, and then you get into the AI summaries. Now the information that was getting spit out in those search results is getting aggregated, and you're hoping you're part of that aggregation, because there are citation links — well, sometimes there are citation links, sometimes there aren't. Sometimes you see your name, sometimes it's just a little indicator you have to click open to get more.

Bill Ferris 24:09
I don't know how on top of the SEO and click-through data other people are, but nowadays you've got a growing trend toward zero-click searches that keeps increasing. You may see a slightly lower rate of that on commercial or transactional intent, but the trend is still happening. So you start showing up on page one, okay, but if no one's clicking because everything is designed to answer their question without a click — like I said, it's nice to be there, it's nice to show improvement. I know we get pitched by agencies trying to sell some of the old SEO tactics on everything, and I'm like, yeah, but I don't know that it's worth it. To your point, you still want the bare bones of being indexable and scannable by traditional search engines as well as AI, and you try to structure your product pages, category pages, and blogs so they're appealing to the AI engines — whether that's a listicle, some kind of FAQ schema, you do all those things. It's just, I guess, getting bent out of shape over not being at the very, very top — that's just not worth the emotional bandwidth.

Andrew Maff 25:36
Yeah, no, I agree. Honestly, Bill, you and I could probably rant about how the market has changed from a marketing perspective over the past couple of years for hours on end, but I know you're super busy. I really appreciate your time — this was awesome. I'd love to give you the floor: tell everyone where they can find out more about you and, of course, more about Decor Outdoor.

Bill Ferris 25:55
Yeah, we're just at DecorOutdoor.com, and we're selling essentially luxury outdoor patio umbrellas, furniture, some heating items, and lighting. That's essentially where you can find us.

Andrew Maff 26:16
Perfect, Bill, thank you so much. And everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do that whole usual thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. As usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 26:35
Thank you for tuning in to the E-comm Show. Head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm Show!