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September 6, 2013  by in Industry, Web Retail   

Online Furniture Sales March on. Are You Part of the Parade?

By Powell Slaughter

Whether brick-and-mortar retailers like it or not, e-commerce is serious business in furniture these days. And it will only get bigger.

While still less than 10 percent of total home furnishings sales, the growth of online purchases continues to outstrip more traditional channels as consumers grow more confident in buying via the Net; and as vendors and retailers adapt to serving a consumer goods category that’s quite a bit trickier to deliver than books or apparel.

Pure-play Internet retailers such as Wayfair and Hayneedle come to mind when talking furniture and e-commerce, but Manoj Nigam , president and CEO of Charlotte, N.C.-based online marketing specialist MicroD, believes brick-and-mortar retailers need to embrace the channel, at least to some extent.

MicroD went live with several furniture stores on its new ePiphany Commerce platform during August, starting with Walter E. Smithe in Chicago. The program integrates with MicroD’s ePiphany platform and its Exim electronic data interchange server. A full-fledged launch is set for October High Point Market.

“We think every retailer needs to be ready for e-commerce,” Nigam said. “There’s a fallacy: If I’m selling locally, I don’t need to be in e-commerce. Let’s say I came into your store and saw a product I’m interested in. I go home and do research on line, decide I want it, and then I find I can’t buy it online from you. If I see that Wayfair or another online dealer sells it, I’m not going to worry about returning to your store.

“E-commerce isn’t necessarily an offensive strategy, it can be a defensive strategy against your becoming a showroom for consumers who buy somewhere else if you’re not even in the game.”

IN ITS INFANCY
Selling furniture online is still in its “infancy,” according to Carl Prindle, president and CEO of Furniture.com, and the online furniture site’s Blueport Commerce platform. He said it’s one of the last major consumer categories to go online in a meaningful way.

Furniture.com will relaunch this fall with new ownership investment from retailers Schottenstein Stores (owner of American Signature and Value <st1:placetype w:st="on">City); and Rooms to Go. The venture will rely heavily on fulfillment by local “anchors,” which as of press time include RC Willey, Leon’s and Sleepy’s, along with those retailers with an ownership stake.

 

“Furniture today reminds me a lot of shoes online, pre-Zappos,” Prindle said. “For years, no one thought anyone would buy shoes online. Then, Zappos delivered a customer experience that wowed consumers.  The rest is history.

“Furniture shoppers are no different than other online shoppers—they’re waiting for a ‘wow’ experience that makes furniture shopping meaningfully easier and better,” he said. “They’ve come to expect great selection, expert advice, fast and inexpensive delivery, and the ability to return something if it goes wrong.”

Prindle believes that to date, the online furniture shopping experience hasn’t met that standard.
“A lot of the furniture sold online to date has been through ‘pure plays’—companies looking to be the Amazon of furniture,” he said. “Unlike Amazon, however, there’s no UPS for furniture. As a result, delivery experiences are slow, expensive and problematic, returns are even worse. Shoppers are underwhelmed, except maybe for smaller, UPSable pieces like accents and occasional.”
He added that this is good news for traditional furniture retailers, not because furniture sales won’t keep growing online, but because they know how to provide the service and ‘wow’ factor.

ON THE OTHER HAND
While furniture e-commerce certainly faces unique logistical challenges, some of those pure-play companies might take issue with the above, and can point to big strides in terms of the shopping experience and service during and after the sale.
Boston-based Wayfair, for example, which is tracking 50 percent-plus growth this year on the way to a projected $1 billion in sales, makes a huge investment in providing detailed product information and inspiring ideas as part of its creation of a rich online shopping experience.
“We’re doing a few things particularly appealing to customers,” said CEO Niraj Shah. “First, we continue to offer the right product with the biggest selection, competitive pricing, better images and information.
“In the last year we’re offering a lot more online help to the shopping process, both things we’ve done in-house and through partners, sections like Room Inspirations, Shop by Color. All those things make the online experience richer and richer.”
He noted that there’s room for online customers to have better tools to visualize product in their space, things like 3-D imaging tools.
“There are 10 to 12 companies out there with different approaches to that, and we’re watching all those very closely,” Shah said. “One of the reasons we’ve succeeded is having best-in-class techonology, and if you’re not providing the best experience (shoppers) will go somewhere else.”
Sara Shikhman, president of BedroomFurnitureDiscounts.com, said her company used to get a lot of customers calling to say they were a bit wary about making big-ticket purchases on the Internet.
“Now consumers are becoming more comfortable with doing a lot of their own research online and are quickly able to find reviews, prices, and offers from several different merchants,” she said. “We are based in New York and have great partnerships with the top white-glove delivery companies around the country, but I would like to see the furniture home delivery industry expand their efforts to service all areas of the country well.
“For example, a customer living in North Carolina could potentially receive an order in just a couple days because many vendors’ warehouses are located there.”
To get there, more vendors need to use electronic data interchange and ship orders quickly.
“Online consumers need to get their products as quickly as possible and we as an industry need to meet that demand,” she said. “We built a custom cloud-based software to handle our orders all over the country that allows our vendors, partners, customers, salespeople and customer service staff to login from anywhere and manage their own orders. This helps fulfill the online customers expectation of having accurate real time information about their orders 24/7.”

THE FUTURE IS NOW
For years, brick-and-mortar retailers said consumers won’t buy “real” furniture, that is bedrooms, sofas, dining rooms, etc., on line, but companies such as Wayfair and BedroomFurnitureDiscounts.com—not to mention more and more retailers with a foot in both brick-and-mortar and online channels—keep proving them wrong. That said, some keys to online business remain remarkably similar to those in the store.
“You want a company you can trust for product, service, selection and competitive pricing; and you need them to help you,” Shah said. “There are two reasons people buy online: access to more selection; and the convenience to do it where and whenever they want.”
Interestingly, Wayfair is finding some synergy with brick-and-mortar stores through its Get It Near Me program, which continues to grow. The program lets a brick-and-mortar retailer advertise on Wayfair’s site next to the product and brands of their choice want. There are currently 170 active advertisers in the Get It Near Me program, up 70 percent from 100 at this time year ago. Those include American Furniture Warehouse, Jerome’s, Leader’s Furniture and Nebraska Furniture Warehouse. Five or more advertisers are in each of the top 25 <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S. metro areas; and 17 of the Top 100 furniture retailers, up from 4 a year ago.
“They’ve been talking about how its very high-ROI for them because they’re getting in front of a motivated consumer who wants to buy,” Shah said. “Only 8 percent of the market is online, but our view is the majority of our traffic is people researching. It helps us pay for providing all the information that we put online.”
Shikhman said that BedroomFurnitureDiscounts.com keeps looking for ways to make its buying experience more customer-focused, with quicker, more reliable service.
“As our service gets better, sales improve,” she said. “This is the balance that we strive to achieve each and every day.”
In the past 12 months, for example, the company added an entire section for children’s furniture.
“It was very exciting, and the site has been getting a lot of attention,” Shikhman said. “I think it works so well because it adds a nice, whimsical touch to the experience, and allows children to shop with their parents for the bedroom of their dreams.
BedroomFurnitureDiscounts.com also have implemented a Q&A section to give customers an opportunity to ask other customers questions about products.
“They can ask us or other customers anything about a product and usually get a response within a day,” she said. “We have also begun to advertise much more on social media sites and get more involved with online interaction with our customers whether it be through online chat, Facebook, Twitter, Houzz, or other platforms.”
Some things, though, storefront or online, never change.
“Reputation is key,” Shikhman said. “We have been able to achieve top ratings on Google for our service and customers come to us because they know they will get great service.” HFB</st1:country-region>

 

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Furniture.com Sets for Re-Launch

An Online Furniture Retailing Pioneer Gets a Makeover.
This summer, one of online furniture retailing’s original names, Furniture.com, announced it would re-launch in the fall.
In addition to a new ownership stake taken by furniture retailers Schottenstein Stores and Rooms to Go, the revamped site is developing a network of regional retail heavyweights to handle order fulfillment nationwide.
Carl Prindle, CEO of Furniture.com and e-commerce platform Blueport Commerce, shared some thoughts about the relaunch.
Furniture.com originally began back in the 1990s, when online retailing was just getting started. The logistical and service issues associated with a bulky product, plus the fact that the whole concept of buying furniture online was brand new, had the company losing money.
Under the new version, the site looks to rely on brick-and-mortar retailers’ traditional strengths in customer service to avoid those issues.
So what’s going to be different about the consumer experience on Furniture.com?
“Where most furniture e-commerce sites are weak—delivery and set up of real furniture—we’ll be great,” Prindle said. “We’ll be able to get 70 percent of the population a sofa in a few days, for a very low delivery fee, set it up in their home, and if it’s not right, take it back. Thanks to the distribution muscle of our retail partners, we’ll be able create the wow delivery experience that unlocks furniture online.”
On the product side, Furniture.com will offer a selection of participating retailers’ best merchandise, as well items they may not carry in the stores.
“Across rooms, styles and price points, we’ll offer a broad but curated selection of products, all delivered with same level of care and expertise,” Prindle said. Finally, we have some new technologies around matching consumers to the right pieces and visualizing them in their home that will complete our offering over the next year or so.
“All in all, we feel like we have the opportunity to transform furniture shopping online, by marrying what our retail partners do best, our technology and expertise and the best URL in in the business.”

NEW PARTNERS
Some mighty big names in furniture retailing have an ownership stake in the business now, and Prindle said he’s flattered by their commitment to the model.
“Most of the retailers that have invested were already clients, so for them to want to be a part of the business is something I’m very proud of and grateful for,” he said. “The investment was an outcome of a process that began with a well-known technology company offering to buy Blueport. That spurred a process that resulted in offers from technology companies, pure financial investors and the furniture players that ultimately invested.”
Furniture.com opted to partner with those retailers rather than financial or technology companies since they could provide the ability to deliver goods.  
“Not to be glib, but we had the technology, and money isn’t hard to come by,” Prindle said. “Partnering with Top 10 retailers with the distribution muscle to deliver the experience that today’s shoppers demand—that was a game changing opportunity for us, and it’s been everything we hoped.”
Any changes to the Blueport platform that were made to accommodate the retail alliance, both for those with ownership and the anchors?
“Our business has always been about enabling furniture retailers online, whether by helping them with their own e-commerce sites on our platform, or driving incremental sales on Furniture.com,” Prindle said. “Over the past decade, most everything we do has been geared to what we’re doing now for the retailers in our alliance.
“That said, the size and vision of the industry leaders we’re working with now takes it to a new level. As an example, for some time, we’ve been looking for a client to pioneer a seamless, omnichannel approach to our Blueport business. With our new partners, we’ve finally been able to build and deploy this system on our retailers’ Web sites.”
Let’s say a shopper visits a Value City store, works with a salesperson and puts aside merchandise. 
“After they’ve shopped around or checked with their spouse, they can complete their order on a phone, tablet or desktop, without having to go back to the store,” Prindle said. “Conversely, a shopper can start an order online, send it to the store, then stop by the store to touch and feel and quickly complete their sale.”
The patent-pending system “reflects the fact that in furniture, showrooms and salespeople play a real role in the sales process,” he said. “Instead of imagining we can circumvent either, we’ve enabled this shopping process, and seen phenomenal results.
“It takes a certain type of retailer to try something as revolutionary as this, and we’re lucky enough to have exactly these types of partners.”