Wayfair: Marketing Strategy & Challenges

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Based on your experiences, was this decrease in re-engagement rate permanent? Was it a function of lasting impacts from ATT, or do you think it was due to the bad market for housing and consumers not spending much because interest rates are up? How would you assess what's happened to re-engagement over time based on these factors?

Another reason you didn't mention is that competition has become more fierce. For example, Amazon, which at one point didn't prioritize its home improvement category, stopped marketing it during Covid. Wayfair benefited from that since everything else was closed. However, Amazon has since prioritized it again, making it tougher for Wayfair to compete.

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Do you think that manifested in a way where, for a while, Wayfair had an open field to pursue cheap ads through platforms like PLA, but then other furniture companies started bidding on PLA, and the opportunities narrowed? Did that competitive pressure manifest in that way?

Eventually, once companies like Feedonomics emerged, which help with feed optimization and Smartly which helps to make images in PLAs and on social media more compelling, it turned out that Wayfair was not ready to compete with that. The problem was that by that time, there was already legacy software, and many people who built that software were let go during layoffs. The tech team was transferred to India in an outsourced mode. Obviously, they can't be tasked with maintaining all these tools and competing with market solutions where entire companies are built around them, with enough resources and research to develop them further.

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Now that you've been outside of the company for a while and are working with these external vendors, do you think Wayfair is in an unwinnable position? They are probably tied to their internally developed Martech Stack, whereas there are really good external vendors out there who might be innovating more quickly or have more scale to invest in R&D. Wayfair seems to be more in this outsourcing mode to India. In your judgment, working with these external vendors, how do you think it stacks up today?

If Wayfair were to use Klaviyo, they could handle this in a much more robust way. There are more solutions than just Klaviyo, like Braze and other companies. My point is, as you mentioned, Wayfair is somewhat stuck with software acquired long ago, and there aren't necessarily the capabilities to maintain it and ensure a good return on investment.

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