How to Sell Furniture Online? A Step-by-Step Guide
Updated on January 2, 2023 in Ecommerce by Nishant Shrimali
We are here to help you set up your own online store to sell furniture online. Moreover, if you are ready, we will also be sharing the secret to growing and running a successful online business.
But before we start with all the steps, here’s a heads up for you to know more about your online furniture selling world.
The following chart from 2019 shows that the online market for furniture and home-decor goods was all set to grow. In addition, when the world was under lockdown, people all across the world leaned towards the ease of shopping from the comfort of their homes.
All this has resulted in the best time to have your own eCommerce store and learn to sell furniture online.
Hence here it is, the ultimate guide for beginners to sell furniture online and grow your eCommerce.
The Ultimate Guide to Sell Furniture Online
Choose your Products
The term “furniture” itself is broad enough to mess up your store and confuse your potential customer. As a beginner, you need to narrow it down to keep it manageable and easy to track.
You can start with about four or five types of products and make your way up as your revenue increases.
How can you choose your product?
- Firstly, choose the products that you have thorough knowledge and interest in. This will help you understand the insights about the industry.
- Second, know what’s popular and most in-demand within your category of audience. It is important to make your brand familiar with the audience, so narrow down your options, with respect to what customers are searching for the most.
(You can use Google Trends to Compare and know more about the audience searching behavior over a course of time)
- Finally, before you start to sell furniture online, ensure the availability of the products that you have chosen. See if or not you will be able to fulfill the demand, with the time.
Know your Audience
Once you have the products onboard, it’s time to know your audience. If you want to sell furniture online successfully in the long run it’s important that you are aware of your customer’s likes and dislikes.
To start with, create your buyer’s persona. These are the imaginative figures of the types of your customer that will be interested in your product.
Note down the age group, hobbies, interests, likes, location, spending power, type of buyer (Frequent or casual), and most active time of their purchase.
There is no exact tool, hence you need to fill in this data by your people skills and observation skills with the market. Not only will this help you sell furniture online, but it will also help you understand what’s a common pain point of your customer can turn out to be your selling point.
Create your Selling Point
As we were discussing, it is important that you have a selling point for your eCommerce. This factor will determine how many visitors will actually become your customers.
If you wish to successfully sell furniture online, figure out the difficulties people are facing and how can you resolve them. Some simple examples could be
- The lack of trendy design in the market that you can fulfill
- The lack of personalization which customer wants, and you can fulfill
- Unfulfilling quality of products at the best price
- Lack of multi-purpose furniture that your customers are looking for
The modern world is no more about just the product that you are delivering but also the efforts that you are reducing for your customer. Moreover, if you can balance out your profit and customer satisfaction, you can hope to have a long time in eCommerce to sell furniture online.
Finalize your Platform
Know that you have decided on the products, the customer’s and the USP of your eCommerce, it’s time to rent land. In terms of eCommerce, choose a platform to step up your store. There are two types of platforms with their respective pros and cons.
Marketplace
A common platform where you just need to create an account, list products, promote them and count your sales. To understand better, Amazon is a marketplace, where a seller can list the products and a buyer can choose the product from a number of sellers.
Some of the most common marketplace to sell furniture online are Wayfair and Bonanza.
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to upload and sell furniture online | Lesser control over the way your store looks |
| Have a huge active customer base, which makes it easy for you to make a sale | Higher Competition with lesser flexibility to attract targeted customer |
| Some of the marketplaces take care of the shipping and marketing of the product | Cost you monthly fees and a commission on every product that you sell |
| Easy to keep track of sales and inventory as most of the marketplace provides a dashboard to their sellers, with all the information they will need, regarding their products. | |
| A quicker way to make your brand recognizable and aware within the audience |
Even though the Marketplace is a great place to start, it has its own restrictions regarding the way you present your products, the way you sell your products, and the commission over each product that sells.
Hence, another platform to sell furniture online would be your own website.
Self-Hosted Websites
A self-hosting website gives complete control over the way you wish to run your business. To start with this, you would need to purchase a hosting and a domain name for your brand. If you are just starting out with no exact expected numbers of visitors you can go with shared hosting.
Once done with finalizing the name and the hosting you would have to create the way your website looks and the way your customer will be looking at the product, making a purchase, and tracking it till the shipment.
If all this seems to intimidate you can always rely on, Shopify, Woocommerce, or Bigcommerce which allows you to host and run your site as per your wish and help you with setting up your eCommerce and even running it, with monthly fees, but no commission over the product that you sell.
| Pros | Cons |
| You can manage the business the way you want | Hard to attract and build trust among customers |
| The complete profit that you make while you sell furniture online stays yours, with no deduction on commission | Have to take care of all the business activities like shipping, inventory management (if you do not choose the plan that includes all this) |
| Getting sale can be tough at first, but you are recognized as a brand and have lesser competition compared to one marketplace | Need more time to grow than on Marketplace |
| You can run your offers, sales, or promotional activity according to the nature of your business. | |
| It helps you gain more loyal and returning customers than in the marketplace. |
According to experts, if your budget allows, you can take advantage of the world. This means, while running your own website, also list yourself on the marketplace to keep the revenue rolling in.
At the same time work on building your brand and running your operation with your USP and efforts. Also, most of the marketplace where you can sell furniture online allows you to add your link. If not, you can use the product description to allow people to know more about you on your website.
Upload Your Furniture Products
The next step to sell furniture online would be to upload your products. Irrespective of the platform that you choose, you need to ensure the following factors are checked.
High Quality Images
The image being the primary source of interaction between the product and the customer, you need to have high-quality images of your products. Not only do you need to make sure that the images are well photographed, but are also well edited.
For this, you can outsource your images to the best product image editing service, as it will give your images a professional touch, remove any photography mistakes, and would enhance your overall product image at a cost as little as $0.80 USD per image. If you want to know more, you can contact PixelPhant.
Title
The next key factor that will help you sell furniture online would be the title of your product. For most of the part, keep the title simple and easy to remember. Make sure you add your keyword (Word commonly used by the people for that particular product) to your title.
Lastly, keep the character limit in mind, and if possible add your brand name with the product.
Product Description
Lastly, give your efforts in writing a convincing product description. We have already written an article on how to write the perfect product description. Some of the points that we discussed in that article were
- Keep the description short, yet informative
- Focus on your target audience and their needs with the product
- Don’t sell the product to sell the benefits of the product they will get
- Use technical details to aware of the insights of the product
Set Up Your Online Store
With the above steps, you have managed to create a website, but in order to make it a store to sell furniture online and a store where customers can easily make a purchase, you would need these two additional features.
Set up Payment
Make sure that your store has all the popular payment options, so your customer faces an issue while clearing his payment. Also, have a clear indication of the charges before the billing process.
Sort out Shipping
If you are running are hosting your own eCommerce site then make sure that you have a clear, quick, reliable, and easy-to-track shipping service backing you up.
Note that, If you are selling on an online marketplace, or shared hosting sites like Shopify, Bigcommerce, etc. you would not have trouble in setting up payment getaways or shipping. They have their own logistics and payment system which you can read about on their respective sites.
Promote your Furniture
With all the above steps, you are set to sell furniture online. But in order to do so, you would need to be aware people about your products. For the marketplace, you can start by ensuring the use of the right and popular keywords, along with delivering your customer what was promised. Higher reviews result in better ranking which brings in more sales.
Now if you are hosting your own eCommerce, you could use the following methods in order to promote and sell furniture online.
Social Media
Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc have massive reach for all sets of audiences. Choose the best fit as per your target audience and attract them through posting on the platform consistently.
SEO Ranking
Another method is by getting a higher SEO Ranking. It means getting a higher position in the search results for your target keywords. For this ensure you are following all the prescribed norms of google like using keywords in the title, heading, meta description, URL, and alt tag of the image. Also, other websites are recommending you by providing a link to your site.
Running PPC Ads
Lastly, you can run PPC ads (Pay-Per-Click ads) so that more people can see you in search results. You will only be charged whenever someone clicks on your ads.
You can run these types of ads on both in the marketplace as well as your google search results to sell furniture online, but if you are unaware of how to use them, you can hire an expert for it.
Update your Inventory
Lastly, the most crucial factor to sell furniture online would be to keep your inventory updated. Many eCommerce fail as they aren’t actively observing and updating their product catalog according to the demand and the customer. If you wish to have a long run while you sell furniture online make sure you keep your product list updated according to the following filters.
Most Popular Products
Make sure that you always have your popular products in stock. Moreover keep the specific products that are popular as well as keep experimenting introducing different variations, to see if people like them too.
Now if you have already established a customer base, you can also experiment by adding the product across another niche of furniture, to observe the result and potential of growth.
Rising Trends and Requests
Another factor would be by adding the products which aren’t popular yet, but with time they are showing consistent growth. Make sure to keep your inventory updated with these products too.
If you find any similar product that can complement these rising products then you can also add them to your product list and see if people are interested in buying it too.
Bonus read to succeed
With the above article it is established that in order to sell furniture online, you need to understand what your customer wants. And as we have discussed, you would only need to do a few things right, unless you do too many things wrong.
After Reading this beautiful after we highly recommended to read this article that Best tips for Furniture Photography.
Hence, we hope you have thoroughly gone through the steps to sell furniture online and are all set to grow your eCommerce. But before that, we recommend you to subscribe to our email newsletter below, to keep yourself updated with how you can grow and run your eCommerce.
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