What is Houzz

 

Online marketplaces are usually founded to ensure the easy accessibility of a commodity to a larger audience. One of the largest and best-known marketplaces today, Amazon started out as an online bookseller. Etsy, on the other hand, became known as a hub for handmade, vintage, and crafty products.

 

However, not all marketplaces started out as marketplaces. Facebook and Instagram, although essential players in social commerce today, weren’t created to sell things in the first place, but to foster connections between people.

 

And so did Houzz.

 

Screenshot of the homepage of houzz.com

 

 

The story of Houzz

Although not a social network, the purpose of Houzz is to connect homeowners with renovation and home improvement professionals. Founded in 2009 in California, Houzz was first created when homeowners Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen became frustrated with their renovation project.

 

Noticing a lack of readily available images they could show their architect for inspiration, the couple created a website, Houzz, and invited design and architectural firms to upload their portfolio. This was a win-win scenario: professionals got to showcase their work while home renovators could quickly find inspiration for their next project.

 

Later on, the founders allowed other professionals in the building and home improvement industry to register, creating a database of specialists from interior design and building to plumbing and pest control.

 

The platform’s popularity grew, and in 2014, recognising the opportunity to market products to its huge audience, Houzz created its very own marketplace.

 

Today, Houzz functions as a database of professionals, a marketplace of products, and a hub for inspiration and connection between home renovators. This way, Houzz unites various features of LinkedIn, Amazon, and Facebook for the market segment of home renovation and improvement.

 

Moreover, Houzz even provides essential content and various software tools like renovation trend analytics, cost calculators, and market insights to both homeowners and professionals registered on the platform.

 

Screenshot of houzz.com/pro, Houzz’s landing page for professionals

 

 

Houzz.com in numbers

Houzz.com has around 13 million monthly visitors, mostly from the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. The company counts 65 million active users as well as 2.7 million home improvement professionals registered on the platform.

 

Houzz reports an annual revenue of $379.7 million and employs around 1,700 people. The platform’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, US, but it also has offices in eight other locations, including London (UK), Sydney (Australia) and Tokyo (Japan).

 

 

Houzz as a marketplace

Houzz’s marketplace feature is currently only available in the US, although individual sellers may offer shipping to Canada as well. In other countries where Houzz is present, the menu item “Shop Products” is simply not featured on the local domain.

 

Screenshot of houzz.com.au’s homepage with the Shop Products option missing from the menu bar

 

In the US, Houzz offers a wide range of products across categories like kitchen, bath, outdoors, decor, furniture, home improvement, and more.

 

Shopping on the marketplace is similar to that on Amazon and other major e-Commerce platforms. Shoppers can choose products from the categories listed in the menu, or enter their product name in the search bar.

 

Screenshot of houzz.com featuring random product listings in the category “Mosaic Tiles”

 

Clicking on a listing will lead shoppers to the product page, where they can learn more about the specifics of the item, choose size/quantity where applicable, and place it in their cart. Orders above the value of $49 are usually shipped free of charge, and the marketplace accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal and ApplePay as a method of payment.

 

Houzz works exclusively with third party sellers. This means that unlike Amazon, Houzz doesn’t sell any products itself, it only provides a platform for outside merchants to list their products and find customers.

 

Find out what third party sellers are and how they operate

 

Unfortunately, this business model is very vulnerable to fraudulent sellers who try to make money by infringing on your brand’s IP rights.

 

 

Your IP rights and Houzz

Houzz has an IP protection policy and expects all of its sellers to respect the IP rights of others.

 

However, the policy also states that it’s the responsibility of sellers not to upload infringing content and sell such items, which tends to mean that the marketplace won’t automatically conduct routine IP checks, unless they’re being prompted to do so.

 

But how and when are they prompted to do so? Well, this is where online brand protection comes in.

 

 

Online brand protection on Houzz

globaleyez’s services complement each other to provide optimal protection for your brand’s IP rights both on- and offline, including on platforms like Houzz.

 

As a perfect starting point, we’d recommend our marketplace monitoring service to detect any potentially infringing product listings on Houzz, or on over 150 other marketplaces worldwide. Our state-of-the-art software traxster uses keyword-based searches to discover which listings use your brand or product name, or any other words that may falsely suggest your brand is behind the listing.

 

Extensive filters allow you to exclude authorised sellers (or specific locations, time and date of posting, etc), which means we can quickly narrow down the results to actually infringing listings.

 

But what if fraudsters don’t use keywords but your copyrighted pictures? On a platform like Houzz where professionals upload their portfolio, it’s entirely possible for someone to help themselves to a picture displaying your work and pretend it’s theirs.

 

For a situation like this, we recommend our image monitoring service. With a series of reverse image searches, we look for exact matches and similar images to your copyrighted pictures online.

 

Best of all: our image monitoring tool, infrimage is available as a subscription software, meaning that if you feel up to it, you can access all of its handy features and monitor your images yourself.

 

Finally, we can enforce your rights and demand the removal of the infringing content, including product listings and pictures from the platform.

 

Conclusion

Houzz is a hub of inspiration, products and professionals in the building and home industry. Unfortunately, like any other platform, it may also attract fraudsters who want to make a quick buck by infringing on your brand’s IP rights.

 

Don’t let that happen; contact us and let’s set up a comprehensive online brand protection programme for your brand!