Home Depot Seeds Program — give shoppers the confidence to choose your products over your competitors

Chances are you’ve most likely been to a Home Depot or ordered from them online. Need a new drill? Repainting your living room? Updating your lighting? Bored on a Sunday? It’s off to Home Depot. 

The home improvement retailer has 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and offers more than one million products for its shoppers. They serve DIY customers, professional contractors, and installation businesses across North America. 

For brands that sell their products on HomeDepot.ca, figuring out how to maximize channel sales is critical for business. Brands can of course come to HomeDepot.ca with their own user-generated content (UGC) — like reviews, Q&As, and social posts — but the retail chain partners with Bazaarvoice specifically to provide robust UGC collection tools for brands. 

A UGC strategy done right increases the discoverability of products, boosts sales, and creates a valuable dialogue with customers and new shoppers. It also informs SEO benefits, provides insights for product innovation, reduces return rates, and ensures shoppers have a positive experience with your brand. The impact of reviews by numbers:

Customers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert, according to Bazaarvoice research. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident about the products they buy. 

Home Depot Canada has launched several Bazaarvoice solutions and features that improve the customer experience and help suppliers optimize UGC. One of its most successful solutions is its sampling program, the Home Depot Seeds Program. 

What is the Home Depot Seeds Program?

The Home Depot Seeds Program is a product sampling program that puts a brand’s high-priority products in the hands of Home Depot Canada’s most loyal shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca.

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot partnered to help brands select which key items to sample, identify Home Depot Canada audiences within the sampling community, and guide brands through fulfillment. 

How to leverage the Home Depot Seeds Program

Home Depot encourages its brands to enlist the Seeds Program for seasonal, exclusive, and new products. Or even any products that just need a fresh crop of reviews:

• New products: Brands can collect authentic UGC for products ahead of a new launch. Insights found within reviews ensure your products launch with a bang, and will help future shoppers feel confident about purchasing your new products
• Seasonal items: Optimize seasonal item product pages with UGC to boost discoverability and increase conversions during their limited time
• Home Depot exclusives: If your brand sells products exclusively through Home Depot, then HomeDepot.ca is the only place where shoppers can see that valuable UGC
• Products with outdated reviews: Search engines like Google favor pages with fresh content, so a a continuous flow of review content means more traffic to your product pages, which means more sales

Getting started with Bazaarvoice + Home Depot

The Home Depot Seeds Program has already helped some brands on HomeDepot.ca more than double their conversion rates. In addition, the program has been so successful that Home Depot vendors in the United States are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and product launches. 

Learn more about the Bazaarvoice + Home Depot partnership and more ways you can utilize strategies to increase channel sales over on our partnership page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.