Wayfair Joins the Pinterest-Like Redesign Bandwagon with New Clipboard

Last year, online furniture giant, Wayfair, which was born from CSN Stores, raised $36 million in new funding and revealed that it is seeing $600 million in annual sales (and $2.5 billion in home furnishings sales to date), according to an article in TechCrunch. With 11 million unique customers and 5 million products listed on the site, Wayfair is looking for ways to further expand and grow its digital reach. With companies like eBay and Fab.com following the Pinterest suit, adapting their sites to more visually-minded consumers, it’s no wonder that this home furnishings mega-store also turned to the Internet’s social darling.

Wayfair recently introduced Clipboard, a new component which allows users to drag and drop images from anywhere on the site into a clipboard bar that sticks at the bottom of every page.
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Users can clip any image on the site (from product listings, editorial content, design photos and promotions) to store, save and sort items they like and share them with others. They can share products with friends, pin to Pinterest, and view others’ boards for ideas and inspiration.

Wayfair CEO, Niraj Shah explained that previously, users couldn’t easily visualize all the items they really wanted or liked on the site. This new Clipboard feature is specifically tailored for home decor because users can put together an entire room (lighting, rug, furniture, accent pieces).

Wayfair has always allowed shoppers to sort product classes by color (rugs, pillows, bedding), but the color classification was all done manually, so products that had both colors were really up to the classifier’s discretion and interpretation. Wayfair’s new color-sorting technology will measure the actual pigment content and hue of every product and be able to automatically classify products by color. This feature also includes an interactive color wheel that lets users sort product by color or search for a particular color in one category or across categories. Down the road, Wayfair’s algorithm will be able to display products by complementary colors.