Scholars Scan Furniture’s Online Potential

July 31, 2006  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on August 2006 It’s not true that all college professors work in ivy-covered ivory towers and ponder great thoughts.

Take me, for instance. I work in the catacombs of an aging coliseum, where I sit in an RTA chair at an RTA desk and sometimes think about great furniture. And if you search hard enough in enough ivory towers, you can find scholars who think about things that interest you—how best to market and sell furniture on the Internet.

The problem, of course, is that most academic literature is denser than oak and as tasty as particle board. The writers toss in fancy formulas and $5 words that are de rigeur in academic writing. (An example: using “de rigeur.”) They fill their text with references to boring academic and government publications. They sometimes take a roundabout way to state what seems obvious, although it’s the job of science to help verify what seems to be obvious. (Just ask Isaac Newton.) And scholars publish in obscure academic journals that are hard to find if you don’t know where to look.

So let me make it easier for you. Here’s what some academic journals, the government and professors have said lately about the business of selling furniture online:

• It’s hard to sell furniture online, says the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Marketing professors at Case Western and the University of Arizona say it’s easy to sell books and computers and plane tickets online, but they say it’s difficult to sell products “for which consumption involves high levels of somatic and sensorimotor inputs.” Translation: If you can’t nestle your booty in the cushions and make sure your feet touch the floor, it’s harder to sell that chair online. One solution, they say, might lie in “body-mapping” software that represents a consumer’s bodily dimensions online. It makes sense for shirts but maybe not for love seats.

• You’re selling more online—if you’re a “mail-order house”—the federal government says.

• Uncle Sam doesn’t know what furniture retailers are doing online.

A report on 2004 activity, released in May 2006, offered no estimate for how online sales played a part in $105.6 billion in total furniture sales. Census officials didn’t trust the numbers because they got a poor response rate or because the numbers were too low to be true.

Online mail-order houses sold $4.3 billion in furniture and furnishings online in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on retailers’ e-commerce efforts. That was up 25 percent from the prior year, 2003, which matched the average growth for all online retailing. (Furniture counts for 8 percent of all online mail-order house sales. Computer sales ranked tops, at nearly 20 percent, because of all those dudes getting Dells and other hardware.)

• Color makes a difference, says the European Journal of Marketing.

The color that buyers see on their computer screen may not be the color they get when the furniture arrives at their door. More than half of shoppers in a 2003 experiment said they would not buy indoor furniture online if they were unsure of the color. And just as many said they would return the furniture they bought online if the color was not what they expected.

What this means to you: Make sure the colors on your site match reality, and pray that your customers own decent computer monitors.

• Online shoppers want good recommendations, says the International Journal of Technology Marketing.

Computer science professors in 2005 used online furniture sales when considering “the relative predictive performance of Backpropagation neural networks, Fuzzy ARTMAP neural networks and Support Vector Machines” to provide recommendations to Web shoppers. Translation: They build computer databases of the attributes of nine chairs—and I swear “gestalt” was one of attributes—and tested which of these fancy computer algorithms was best and spat out a recommendation based upon what a user wanted in that chair. Which was best? Support Vector, whatever that means—but what’s important is knowing that users want to customize their shopping experience when they go online.

• Shoppers have to trust you if they’re going to even think about buying online, says the Journal of Marketing.

Marketing researchers in 2003 built fake Web sites for a fake company called “UrbanFurniture” to test hypotheses about what it takes to get people to actually buy high-price products online. From a series of experiments, they learned that shoppers’ “trust in the firm’s ability rather than their trust in its benevolence and integrity” led to sales. The experiments also showed that shoppers are less likely to trust a low-rent Web site than a site that shows some Web-design skill, and that shoppers want proof that their online transaction is secure.

• At least one major furniture company’s Web site contributes to “functional decomposition” of traditional marketing, says Information Systems Management.

Two California-based business researchers say Sauder Furniture, the nation’s largest supplier of ready-to-assemble furniture, has built an online approach that doesn’t necessarily compete with the brick-and-mortar stores that sell its products. The company’s Web site explains all of its products, and has links that deliver shoppers to nearby stores selling its products. That’s good, because it provides a “complementary channel,” the researchers say, but it can be expensive and may not let you know whether the Web site leads to more sales.

The bottom line: Those folks in the ivory towers had access to the Internet long before you did, and they know that most of you in the furniture industry haven’t quite figured out how to make the Web work best for your sales.

But know that they are thinking about you, even if they show their love with big words. HFB