Furniture, as a household staple, is something that most consumers shop for at some point in their life. Whether you’re seeking that futon for your college dorm or the cozy couch for your new family home, finding furniture is a process that takes time. For those in the home furnishings industry, the ecosystem for selling their products has dramatically changed. Consumers are transitioning away from brick and mortar experiences and into digital ones, where a massive product inventory and endless customization helps them find exactly what they are looking for, without leaving the comfort of their home. During this transition, retailers have been forced to adapt quickly and with that rapid change has come confusion and lack of execution. To put it simply, eCommerce is the future and retailers that don’t step up their website game, will be left behind.
As an agency with over a decade of experience in eCommerce design and development, we understand the importance of making the customer journey a memorable one. Customers have no patience for flashy gimmicks or confusing shopping experiences, they crave simplicity. In this new era, the home furnishings industry is struggling to adapt to the current market and losing traction with this new generation of shoppers.
Common Misconceptions
The home furnishings industry is riddled with common myths and misconceptions that lead retailers and manufacturers to believe that their options are limited to what they know. Many of them cling to the belief that they cannot sell furniture effectively online or fail to see the connection between a strong website and strong in-store sales. Here are just a few of the misconceptions that we have encountered:
- Our catalog is too large to manage and the only option is a proprietary or “furniture exclusive” platform.
- Most of our sales are in-store, our website is not as important.
- Customers do not purchase furniture online.
- There are no reliable ways to ship large items or manage in-house delivery options.
These are some of the most common objections we hear, but there are certainly more. The home furnishings industry is changing drastically and with that brings challenges that manufacturers and retailers face. But we are here to dispel the myths, and open some eyes to new solutions to help furniture manufacturers and retailers grow their business not just for today, but for years to come.
Dispelling the Myths
“Our catalog is too large to manage and the only option is a proprietary or “furniture exclusive” platform.”
This is one of the most common misconceptions we hear, manufacturers and retailers simply don’t know how they would manage their catalogs without these furniture exclusive platforms. It’s easy to understand why—furniture manufacturers and retailers are overwhelmed by the prospect of managing large product catalogs. Take a sofa, for instance. A sofa comes with a variety of options—from dozens of fabric colors and textures to leg designs, arm types, and sizes. Now multiply those same attributes across dozens of sofa collections. The amount of data seems to pile up drastically, and that’s only sofas. For both manufacturers and retailers alike, a major challenge is the management of this data and ensuring it’s accurate and up to date.
Maintaining that much data can feel intimidating for manufacturers and retailers, and as a result, they may feel trapped by the sheer size of their catalogs. It’s easy to see why they cling to their furniture exclusive platforms. They are led to believe that only a furniture exclusive platform can handle their unique furniture data challenges. In some ways, they are uniquely suited, but using these platforms can come at a steep price. The price being an inability to grow and scale over time. Constraints can include:
- Lack of innovation and ability to pivot and make changes quickly.
- The lack of options and ability to create custom solutions.
- Website performance issues, like slow page loading, caused by poor website hosting configurations.
- Duplicate content due to the same catalog information (including product descriptions) being shared across hundreds of other sites.
- Furniture exclusive platforms are often template solutions. These templates are offered to hundreds of other retailers, not allowing for much differentiation from retailer to retailer.
- For any new custom feature a retailer requests, they are essentially paying for that feature to be shared with all of the other websites on the platform.
These roadblocks and more can hold a retailer or manufacturer back from progress.
The truth is that furniture exclusive platforms are not the only options available. What manufacturers and retailers don’t realize is that there are other platforms and options available that can handle their unique challenges and allow them to scale. They haven’t been exposed to these options, since furniture trade shows and conferences are packed to the gills with only the “furniture exclusive” platform options and have been for years.
A viable alternative solution is Magento. Magento is an open source technology solution that provides online retailers with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento is a platform built to handle unique and challenging situations like the ones affecting the home furnishings industry. Here’s how:
- Magento easily integrates with a variety of 3rd party systems like ERPs, PIMs (Product Information Manager), or CRMs via API, extensions (pre-built or custom), or flat file integrations. For both manufacturers and retailers, 3rd party connections can be made between systems in order to easily flow data back and forth.
- Magento is uniquely suited to handle large amounts of data and manage complex catalogs. You can create as many attributes as you need, control which items appear and when, manage pricing in bulk, and much more.
- The Magento Community is one of the largest in the world, giving retailers access to the latest eCommerce innovations, not to mention hundreds of pre-built extensions to enhance the functionality of your store.
- If there’s a feature you need, Magento is flexible and allows for any amount of customization in order to create a solution that works right for your business and you own it, meaning you aren’t having to share it with competitors. You are also not beholden to waiting for the next “feature release”, you can add features when you are ready.
This means that manufacturers and retailers don’t have to be tied down to the myth that furniture exclusive platforms are their only options. Moving to a platform like Magento gives the control back to the retailers and manufacturers to create a process that works best for them and their customers. This can have a quite a few benefits:
- Reduces the risks of workarounds on the backend to accommodate software, which ultimately increases efficiency.
- Whether you are a manufacturer selling to retailers or a retailer selling direct to consumer, the ability to integrate with different data endpoints gives you the power to, receive, send, and edit data and remove the middle man.
- Retailers and manufacturers can trust the performance of their site by choosing a cloud solution (like Magento Cloud Commerce) or if they need more control, they can create a hosting infrastructure that can scale to accommodate changes in traffic or data. Putting the retailer in control, not the software.
- Customer experience is an essential part of an online business. When the software can conform to the retailer, it can also be adapted to conform to a retailer’s customer preferences, therefore creating a better customer experience.
Don’t give into the myth of “furniture exclusive” platforms, there are so many solutions out there that put you in control.
“Customers do not purchase furniture online.”
For the Retailer
First, let us understand that eCommerce furniture sales generated $65.1 billion in 2018 alone and is expected to rise to $100 billion by 2023. That means a total of 12.5% of eCommerce sales in 2018 were from the furniture and home furnishings industry. This number is only expected to rise, toppling 14% by 2023. These numbers might not seem very large, but in reality, these statistics validate that there is a major shift in the market and more consumers are comfortable shopping for furniture online. New generations of shoppers are emerging and their purchasing practices differ drastically from past generations.
In the traditional furniture retail space, things haven’t changed much.
- Customers can purchase an item at retail cost or they are forced to use in-store financing options for their purchase (watch out for the small print).
- They hear about sales or promotions through their local radio stations or a gaudy billboard.
- There is little to no education on the differences between items or an effort to nurture the customer experience.
The millennial audience, which accounts for 37% of furniture and bedding consumer market, is not looking for these traditional experiences. They are smart and have proven to be more apprehensive, steering clear from bait & switch sales and tricky finance schemes. They are avoiding credit cards and opting to only use their debit cards, limiting them to the money they have in their bank accounts. They are also looking for that great experience and will often choose a brand for the experience they provide over the pricing of their furniture—proving they would be willing to pay a higher price if they can have a great experience. For the furniture industry in particular, where the price of items can be high, introducing alternative payment options can be an effective way to boost conversions and serve this audience.
According to industry studies, 55% of all online transactions will be made using alternative payments. Methods like instant financing are becoming a popular option because it is a less invasive way to get instant approval, it allows for several choices to pay back, and it’s a method that can be used at any retailer offering that payment option. Not to mention there are benefits to retailers with these new solutions, such as putting the liability of money collection on the 3rd-party and protecting the retailer by being paid instantly.
A platform like Magento has options like Klarna, an instant financing solution, natively installed in the platform. This makes it easier than ever to begin using alternative payment methods. But instant financing isn’t the only alternative payment option within Magento. Magento has an extensive list of payment methods natively installed. If what you need isn’t installed natively, there are always extensions available. This allows retailers to choose what works best for them based or their business needs or customer preferences, whether it be Apple Pay, PayPal, or Pay with Amazon.
Another interesting innovation to mention is the introduction of Virtual Reality (VR). VR applications allow a customer to see the furniture they are about to purchase in a way they never have before, making it easier than ever for an online customer to visualize what it would look like in their home. What used to be a roadblock to furniture shopping online, is quickly going away. Customers can see a sofa they want to purchase in a room with the furniture they already own, they can test out a chandelier in their foyer, or see if a lamp looks good in their bedroom. The possibilities are endless.
For the Manufacturer
Let’s switch gears to the B2B side of the furniture industry where the customers are now the furniture retailers. Forrester Research predicts B2B revenue to be nearly $1.13 trillion by 2020 with a majority of that revenue coming from online purchases. This means manufacturers must manage their retailers and provide a good experience, ultimately making it easier for those retailers to purchase their products and sell more. Manufacturers need to make the purchase experience easier, and what better way than to shift to an eCommerce model.
For B2B in particular, a platform like Magento allows manufacturers the flexibility to manage their retail customers easily and efficiently with features like:
- Creating customer groups, with pricing tiers, for specific retailers based on volume of sales.
- Controlling the content and collections each customer group is able to see.
- Digital buying experiences for retailers to browse products, eliminating the need for catalogs (thus saving money).
It’s features like these that create a better experience for retailers but also allows manufacturers to organize and manage their retailers more efficiently. It’s also important to note that furniture exclusive platforms are not equipped to manage B2B sales at this level.
“There are no reliable ways to ship large items or manage in-house delivery options.”
When it comes to shipping, furniture is one of the toughest items for retailers to handle. It’s big, expensive, and comes with risk. If a buyer spends $2,000 on a sofa, they are expecting it to be shipped to them in pristine shape, not damaged or dysfunctional. In the event there is an issue, it can be a pain to ship back too. For this reason, delivery is often managed by a local team and not handled by regular carriers like UPS, FedEx, or USPS. It’s often been the myth that you cannot sell furniture online because, how would you ship it?
As we have established, Magento’s ability to work with third-party applications and extensions gives it an advantage over other platforms. With native functions like Magento Shipping or the use of extensions, retailers can take control of their shipping options, including options to handle large items. For retailers, Magento makes it easy to indicate what shipping methods are available (including integrations for in-house shipping) for certain products, enable shipping restrictions on items that need scheduled delivery, or provide options for in-home installation. For a manufacturer who has multiple warehouses with different products, it’s possible to create shipping rules and restrictions based order attributes and have the flexibility to work with multiple shipping providers.
The point is, there are options! Shipping is not a barrier for manufacturers and retailers to sell online. With the plethora of options available in a platform like Magento, retailers and manufacturers need not fear!
Next Steps
What is the next step to actually selling furniture online? The first is accepting that what you probably thought you knew isn’t true and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Whether you are at the beginning of your journey or ready to go deeper in eCommerce, Gauge, a Magento Business Partner, is here and ready to chat with you and help you get started on your eCommerce journey. If you don’t know the next steps, check out our replatforming guide that is filled with a decade worth of experiences and information about the entire replatforming process.
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