Together let’s make shopping online for furniture through local stores great.
“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goal.” -Idowu Koyenikan
The internet has permanently and profoundly changed how people shop, conduct research, and communicate. The impact on furniture retailing has been nothing short of transformative – redefining customer expectations, and forcing traditional brick and mortar retailers to adapt or face obsolescence.
A recent study by Consumer Insights found that 76% of consumers (more than three in four) said they prefer to purchase furniture in-store vs. online.
However, being a great brick and mortar retail operator with great merchandising, beautiful stores, plenty of inventory, effective marketing, helpful salespeople, and first-class customer service is no longer good enough. Retailers must have a great online presence, too. If you don’t, today’s customers will not consider your business.
81% of shoppers conduct research online before making a purchase, and 87% of consumers start their product searches online, regardless of whether the transaction occurs online or in-store.
The biggest decision that most furniture consumers make online is not which product to buy, but which seller to contact. If your company’s online experience is lacking, it won’t be you. If your web presence is less than great, they won’t come to your store, they won’t contact you, and they certainly won’t purchase from you. They’ll click to a better website.
Users form an impression of a website within 0.5 seconds. Users will often leave a website with a bad user experience within the first 10 seconds. Four things that can negatively impact a consumer’s impression the most are: site navigation, site speed, product selection (or more importantly, having what they want), and content quality (descriptions, images and reviews). 88% of online shoppers are less likely to return after a bad user experience.
The incredibly wide product selections, seamless user-friendly online shopping experience, and rich helpful content offered by Amazon and Wayfair raise expectations so high with consumers that it is very challenging for even some of the best traditional brick-and-mortar store websites to compete. In the past ten years Amazon and Wayfair both grew their furniture and bedding revenues by 10 times. Amazon sold an estimated $12 billion last year and Wayfair sold an estimated $9 billion. Together they are rapidly approaching nearly a 20% share of the U.S. furniture and bedding business.
Visiting a local store almost certainly matters more when shopping for furniture than when shopping for other product types because feeling comfort and quality, and seeing scale and color are not possible online. Buying locally is not just about supporting your community. The assistance of well trained, helpful employees can also make a big difference. Helping customers with space planning, color coordinating, accessorizing, custom ordering, and local in-home delivery of big ticket, expensive, complicated furniture products are all important to customers.
But, even though the vast majority of consumers would prefer to buy furniture through local stores, if your business has a less than great online experience, there is a good chance that local shoppers who get frustrated, will skip your store for the convenience and great experience offered by an online-only NotNearMe retailer like Wayfair or Amazon.
Introducing FurnishNearMe – Standing Up 4 Local
What if there were a user-friendly, information rich, furniture shopping site with a huge selection of products, that was focused exclusively on making it easy and great for consumers to shop online for furniture through local stores rather than through Wayfair or Amazon?
Introducing FurnishNearMe: A new shopping website platform that brings together what today’s consumer really wants – the best of both online and local in-store furniture shopping.
FurnishNearMe is inspired by marketplace aggregation shopping platforms like Etsy, Craigslist, Ebay, and Airbnb that offer a revolutionary one-stop destination to consumers by bringing together an incredibly wide assortment of products from a myriad of different sellers into one convenient shopping site, and then making it easy to quickly find, browse and evaluate options.
FurnishNearMe hopes to bring together all of the products available from all of the local independent furniture stores. Unlike Etsy, FurnishNearMe is more of a local search engine marketplace than an e-commerce site. Its purpose is to help shoppers find products that are available locally, find stores that sell those products nearby, and get assistance from helpful people online and through the local stores.
The site was built and is run by FurnitureDealer.Net – The company obsessed with helping local stores succeed online since 1996. They are a software and online marketing company known for building and maintaining the furniture industry’s largest and best content-rich digital shopping product catalogs from most of the leading suppliers who do business through local stores.
The site utilizes FurnitureDealer.Net’s impressive product content library of more than 550,000 products from more than 2,500 supplier/manufacturer catalogs, and combines it with a database directory of every single active local furniture store that they could find in the U.S. made up of nearly 25,000 store locations from more than 11,500 retail companies.
By looking at retailer websites, social media, dealer locators, and other sources, FurnishNearMe identified and connected many retail stores with the vendor product catalogs sold by those retailers.
Shoppers who visit FurnishNearMe today can conveniently find an impressively large assortment of products from the retail stores near them. Every product that shows up in a local shopping market directs people to the local store (or stores) where it can be purchased.
The site is FREE and easy to use for people who work in the industry. All industry insiders are invited to join the effort by looking-up and connecting with your companies, your suppliers, your dealers, and your products.
The goal of FurnishNearMe is to create a truly compelling and useful shopping site. Success will accelerate by getting more people from the industry to join the effort. A ton of work has already been done, the site is growing every day, but there is a lot you can do to help. You can start by making sure your products and your company are listed correctly. Then you can make sure the site is showing and telling shoppers everything they need to know about why they should do business locally with you.
FurnishNearMe is working hard to make more connections, improve accuracy, and edit and add more information. They want to do everything they can to help you, so you can help your customers and partners. The platform connects suppliers, products, retailers, stores and people who work for those companies to each other. By joining, industry insiders are given free tools to show your true colors and communicate what makes you stand out by adding and editing information about your products, inventory, stores, teams, services, promotions and more. The site is designed to conveniently help shoppers find products through local stores and to connect them to helpful salespeople. It also is designed to help insiders attract, assist, serve and sell to those local shoppers.
It’s hard for small companies with limited resources to compete online and have that much-needed GREAT online shopping experience that consumers desire. You don’t have to go it alone. United we stand. Divided we fall. The dream and goal for FurnishNearMe is to BRING THE INDUSTRY TOGETHER 4 GOOD and STAND UP 4 LOCAL.
FurnishNearMe was built to be an industry-wide platform to collaboratively create a really compelling and useful shopping marketplace site that makes it easy and great for consumers to shop online through local stores. To achieve this, FurnishNearMe is offering all kinds of free, valuable tools for industry insiders and companies – to help them market and sell their products locally. Hopefully, you will join and help.
By coming together, we can provide that 4th great option for consumers to shop online for furniture.
1) Not Amazon.
2) Not Wayfair.
3) Not the single company sites run by the handful of retailers with the deepest pockets.
4) FurnishNearMe – The one-stop destination that combines online research and offline in-store shopping to bring together all of the products available from all of the local independent furniture retailers, their showrooms and their helpful assistance.
Can FurnishNearMe give today’s furniture consumers what they want? With your help, we think it can.