Wayfair sees personalized, streamlined customer interaction as key to retaining and attracting customers.
Chain Store Age met with Fiona Tan, CTO of digitally native home furnishings giant Wayfair, at the recent Shoptalk 2025 conference in Las Vegas to discuss topics including the new Wayfair Verified program, tariffs, and the next big thing in retail technology.
Tan was named a Woman of the Year at the 2023 Chain Store Age Retail’s Top Women Awards event.
How would you describe Wayfair Verified?
This is a program that we feel will really be helpful to our customers. Wayfair has a fast selection, but at the same time, we wanted to be able to curate a smaller set of items that we would actually go and physically audit, and we might be putting it together so we would audit the assembly.
Verified will be across different price points and more small styles. We hope that this will be helpful to our customers and they can say, ‘Look, Wayfair stands behind these items.’ It’s an extra stamp of approval from Wayfair.
[READ MORE: Wayfair launches ‘Verified’ program highlighting its ‘most-trusted’ products]
There’s a whole process around it, in terms of selecting the items and then from a technology perspective, it’s how do we showcase the Verified program on our on our site and our customer journey, so that it becomes easier for customers to use it as a way to help curate and find items for them.
How is Wayfair affected by tariffs or by the prospect of tariffs?
Wayfair been working for some time now to diversify our supply chain. The furniture industry has had tariffs already, so we have dealt the issue, and part of that has been some degree of diversifying.
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