The bankruptcy and subsequent closure of Bed Bath & Beyond in the U.S. marked a pivotal moment in retail history. The acquisition of its digital assets and intellectual property by Overstock signified a significant development, given the potential and challenges such a merger entailed.
The practical implementation of this merger, particularly the redirection of bedbathandbeyond.com to overstock.com or vice versa, became a focal point. In June, we published a special report examining the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and providing our insights on the most effective execution strategy.
Between late July and early August, following the closure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s stores, Overstock initiated the domain merger. This article revisits our analysis to evaluate the accuracy of our predictions and the success of the migration.
Bed Bath & Beyond, a dominant force in the home goods sector with over 1,500 stores across North America, shocked consumers with its closure. However, industry observers anticipated the move, as the company faced challenges adapting to changing market dynamics, including shifts in consumer behavior and the transition to e-commerce.
In April 2023, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In June, Overstock purchased BBB’s digital assets and intellectual property for $21.5 million, excluding the closed stores and remaining inventory. Our initial prediction was that overstock.com would be a more valuable domain due to its superior market position and the challenges associated with BBB’s bankruptcy and e-commerce struggles, advocating for the redirection of bedbathandbeyond.com to overstock.com.
Surprisingly, Overstock redirected overstock.com to bedbathandbeyond.com during the domain merger, seemingly capitalizing on BBB’s strong brand recognition in the U.S. Despite the closure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s stores, the brand maintained significant recognition among U.S. consumers. The graph below illustrates BBB’s consistent organic traffic surpassing that of Overstock prior to the migration.
Our analysis revealed that Overstock’s migration strategy was unconventional, with a noticeable drop in keyword performance for the BBB domain in late July, indicating potential flaws in the migration process.
We observed a mixture of redirects, rather than a traditional one-to-one migration, with Overstock’s site move. They re-skinned Overstock’s color theme to resemble BBB and redirected the BBB domain to their servers. They transferred all product catalogs with the same URL structure and redirected overstock.com URLs to bedbathandbeyond.com.
The new BBB homepage offers the familiar brand aesthetic but mimics the structure of the old Overstock website. This strategy allows Overstock to offer its product catalog on the BBB website, enabling loyal customers to continue shopping for familiar products.
However, transferring the product catalog involved redirecting hundreds of thousands of Overstock URLs, leading to some gaps in implementation. We analyzed Overstock.com’s top 10k pages using Ahrefs and Screaming Frog to assess the SEO impact.
We found that some URLs had clean one-to-one redirects, but many redirected to the BBB homepage instead of the intended product or article page. Certain subdomains, such as help.overstock.com, were not redirecting at all. Additionally, 9% of the 10k URLs were 404 broken links.
We identified inconsistencies in redirecting the .html version of URLs, leading to indexing issues and orphan pages. The new category format was linked under its specific main category in the site navigation, while the .html version was not linked well, causing confusion for customers and potential SEO challenges.
Several Bed Bath & Beyond categories were altered during the merger, resulting in 404 errors for popular search terms. We observed that over 70% of the top keywords from BBB, with a search volume of 5000+ in June 2023, had 404 errors.
The merged BBB domain’s top 10 keywords experienced a significant drop in traffic compared to Overstock and BBB’s top 10 keywords before the migration. However, BBB’s traffic saw a substantial increase in August, with a jump of ~304% and a 941.88% increase in the number of keywords ranking for BBB.
While Overstock’s traffic declined from July to August, the number of domains linking to bedbathandbeyond.com increased, and its domain authority improved.
The migration has provided a boost to the new website, as expected, with Overstock’s traffic being redirected to it. However, the redirection process has not been without challenges, with some URLs not redirected or redirected incorrectly, affecting keyword performance, traffic, backlink profile, and search rankings.
Coalition Technologies, a leading SEO and digital agency, has helped generate over half a billion dollars in revenue for over 1,000 online properties worldwide. Contact us for a consultation and free performance audit to optimize your website.
