Company Background
The Pottery Barn was founded in 1949 and has since become the nation's largest home furnishing retailer. They offer furnishings for the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, as well as all rooms in between. Since it's success after being bought by Williams-Sonoma in 1986, Pottery Barn Kids and Pottery Barn Teens have also been opened.
Pottery Barn offers design styles, from contemporary to french country. They have an assortment of fabrics, colors, and woods available to suit anyones needs. Pottery Barn serves the middle to upperclass markets.
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Potterybarn.com is designed to offer shoppers an alternative to crowded shopping malls and limited retail space. It is easy-to-use and has very little writing to it. All writing is short, and concise, and is limited to descriptions of furniture pieces. The website itself does not offer any how-to articles or instruction on home decorating. It does, however, sell books which can provide this instruction. This lack of articles helps keep the sight neat and clean.
The Pottery Barn is an upscale furniture retailer, catering to a middle to upperclass clientelle. The website is designed to showcase items which are available at retail outlets, as well as items available solely online. Shoppers can browse items by category, choose between a variety of colors, and make purchasing and shipping arrangements from the website.
This website aims to exude the same aura as it's retail counterpart. It is set up in an easy-to-use format, suitable for any user, but also offers an upscale feel.
Pottery Barn, as well as other similar retailers such as Restoration Hardware use pictures to draw potential customers in. The sites are filled with visuals, which grab the users attention, and then, upon clicking on them, offer them more detailed information. Pictures are also used to separate merchandise into categories, such as a picture of a bed, which leads to the bedding section, and pictures of towels, which will take the user to the bath section. In general, the retail sites are very visual, and easy to navigate, due to the use of pictures.
You can see many differences between Websites in the retail World. For example, Wal-Mart also has an online store, but it is much more cluttered than that of Pottery Barn. Also, there is much more variety of product on the site, as Wal-Mart is a much larger corporation. You can also see the difference between audiences, as Wal-Mart caters to a more broad, economically diverse audience, while Pottery Barn's is much more specific. Wal-Mart also has it's own furniture section but the page is much more cluttered, and puts less emphasis on the individual items.
I myself, do a lot of online shopping. As I get older, and busier, I find myself shopping online more frequently, as well as making larger purchases online. I think one of the biggest changes in retail websites such as Pottery Barn in the future will be the constant upgrading of security features.