Home Services Platform Porch to Partner with Overstock.com
Porch, an online platform that connects homeowners with local home repair services, announced a partnership with Overstock.com Tuesday. The company’s partnership with Overstock—an e-commerce platform that sells primarily home goods— will allow customers to arrange set-up and installation for their purchases.
The partnership is emblematic of an emerging opportunity in digital commerce: pairing straightforward purchases with location-based service recommendations powered by AI and other cutting-edge technologies.
For a fixed price, Porch offers consumers access to over 300,000 home service professionals. Through a Porch tool called Service Attach, Overstock customers will be able to add installation or assembly services to their online shopping carts. Those customers will also be able to access Porch’s artificial intelligence assistant, which can recommend the best service professionals and serve as a communication platform.
“Overstock sells lots of products today where installation and assembly make complete sense from a customer perspective that they should be included,” said Matt Ehrlichman, CEO of Porch.com. Customers expect installation services for everything from furniture to light fixtures, all of which are sold on Overstock’s online marketplace.
The partnership will increase conversion—the rate at which browsing customers turn to buyers—for Overstock, Ehrlichman said. “That’s one of the benefits for Overstock and for the customer.”
If customers are aware of assembly and installation services when they are making a purchase, it reduces consumer anxiety and makes them more likely to complete the sale, Ehrlichman said. Porch calculates how much its service may increase conversion, but Ehrlichman declined to release those numbers.
“Overstock is a tremendous brand, a great company, (and) they’ve done some fantastic things. And … we launched less than five years ago, so anytime we’re partnered with a great company like Overstock, that’s a good thing for a company like ours,” Ehrlichman said.
Porch remains focused “purely on the home.” The company hopes to improve its technology, including its AI assistant, over the next year. In addition, Ehrlichman hopes to offer improved options for Porch’s retail partners and ensure the company is “great at fulfillment,” the CEO said. “We’re focused on making those experiences better.”
Porch was founded in 2013, and its growth has more than doubled YOY over the last few years, Ehrlichman said. He believes that the home services industry has become a two-way competition between Porch and Home Advisor. “We’re excited about how we’re positioned … as a technology company for meeting the needs of the consumer,” he said.
Anna Kramer is a staff writer at Street Fight.