A Comprehensive Guide On Selling Furniture Online
This is the era of screens and the internet. Now, everything begins from the internet and ends at the internet. So in such times, relying on the traditional ways won’t work. That’s why we are here with this guide to help you out in selling your furniture online. Excited enough? So, keep reading…
- February 3, 2023
- by Rajeev Nar
How to Sell Furniture Online?
Before we begin discussing our detailed guide on selling furniture online, you need to ask yourself a few questions. The questions are: How much amount do you need for starting an online business? How much space do you need? What is your niche? Will you manufacture and design, make by hand, drop ship or resell.
There’s a lot of competition in the market, that’s why it is so important to make your brand different from the market such as offering unique, one of a kind and high-quality products.
Okay, without making you wait anymore, let’s just get started with our guide!
Select your Products
The word “furniture” is big enough to bring a lot of confusion in the mind of your future customer and to mess up your entire store. As a person who just entered the furniture business, you need to make that word narrow so that it can be managed and tracked easily. Moreover, you can begin with about five or six kinds of products. Gradually, you can increase the number of products with the increase in revenue
How can you pick your product:- The next big task is picking the perfect product that can give you good returns, right?
So, first, pick all the products that you are familiar with and you have an interest in. This will assist you in understanding the insights of the industry.
Secondly, try to know what is in demand and what’s most popular within the category of audience. It is significant to make your chosen brand familiar with your audience, that’s why narrow down all your options, according to what the customers are searching for the most on the web.
Ultimately, before you begin to sell your furniture online, make sure that the chosen products are available. Check whether you will be able to satisfy the demands of the customers in time or not.
Understand your audience
Once you decide on the product you wish to sell, the next step is to know and understand your audience. If you wish to sell the furniture online in the long run then it’s very important to be aware of the likes and dislikes of your customers.
To begin with, build the persona of your buyers. What is a persona? Personas are nothing but the supposed figures of the kinds of customer that will show interest in your products.
Write down the age category, interests, hobbies, location, likes, kind of buyer (casual or frequent), spending power and their preferred time of buying.
There’s no precise tool, so you need to fill the data by your observation and skills only. This will not only assist you in selling your furniture online but also it will help you in understanding the common issues of customers. When you will know these issues, you’ll try not to offer the same issue to them and it will turn out to be your unique selling point.
Build your selling point.
After you get to know your audience, the next step is building your selling point. As we were already discussing how important it is to have a selling point. The reason behind this is, this factor will ultimately finalise how many viewers are going to become customers.
Moreover, if you want to sell the furniture successfully on an online store, then find out the issues or problems the customers are facing. After finding out the issues, find out how you can solve them. Some simple instances could be:
- The absence of the trending designs in the market that you can satisfy.
- The absence of personalisation that a customer wants, and you can satisfy.
- Unsatisfying quality of the products even at the best price.
- Absence of multi-function furniture.
The world now is not only about the product that you are selling but also the efforts you are making to sell it. Furthermore, if you can make up for your customer satisfaction and profit, then you can stay for a long time in the online market.
Finalise your marketing platform.
Once you have finalised the products, the people and the unique selling point of your furniture store then and here comes the time to finalise the platform on which you are going to sell the furniture.
There are two types of e-commerce marketing platforms that you can choose from i.e., a Marketplace or Hosting. Both of them have their merits and demerits
What is a Marketplace:- A marketplace is a standard platform where you create an account, list the products advertised and promote them and then count your sales.
To understand a marketplace better take the example of Amazon. It is also a marketplace where the sellers list the product and a customer can select the product from a variety of products and sellers.You can check out this blog for more information and learn about the best eCommerce platforms for small business in the UK.
Here are some of the marketplaces:
1. BigCommerce:- This marketplace will suit best for the small and medium-sized enterprises who wish to get a quick and easy launch as well as the fast growth of their online furniture business.
It is less changeable than the other e-commerce marketplaces such as Magento, in terms of integrated extensions and website customisation. But it provides many other extraordinary solutions for your online furniture business that does not need an Asian technology team for administration and website infrastructure.
2. Shopify:- Shopify offers two plans for the businesses depending on their size. They are:
- Shopify for small and medium enterprises and for those who all are already in the retail sector but want to enter into the world of e-commerce.
- And next is Shopify plus which is for enterprise-level businesses.
There is not much difference in both of the plans both of them work almost in the same way. All you need to do is to decide the scale of your online furniture business. The most beautiful thing about this platform is that it is highly adaptable and flexible. That means you can insert limitless items in your catalogue, choose from around 60 plus website themes and integrate it with around 70 Plus payment gateways such as Amazon payments, PayPal etc.
3. Magento:- Now we are introducing you to the platform which ranks second in the top ten most popular eCommerce platforms list. That is none other than Magento. It offers both free as well as paid plans- Commerce Cloud and Magento Commerce for the big enterprises and Magento OpenSource for the small and medium enterprises. Also, it provides various layouts for your website that fits your aesthetic as well as technical needs.
The difference that Magento makes from other competitors is that it is customisable from A to Z. Wanting to insert a form for your user to help them customise their order? Or wishing to alter the layout or shopping cart? Don’t worry because you can do this all with the help of coding, you can take benefit of its functionality on your eCommerce website
Self-hosted websites:- A self-hosting site provides you with total control over the way you operate your business. To begin with this, you’d need to buy a domain name and hosting for your website. Besides, if you’re just a beginner with no idea about the number of visitors, then you can opt for shared hosting.
Moreover, once you are done with deciding the hosting and name, then you have to develop the way your site looks and the way your customers will see the product, make a purchase and track it till the shipment.
If this seems to terrify you, then you can depend on Woocommerce, BigCommerce or Shopify. They all will allow you to run and host your website according to your wish and assist you in establishing and running your eCommerce. For these services, they charge a monthly fee, but they do not charge even a single penny for the commission you get on the products.Learn more about how much does a website cost in the UK?
Title of the product
The next significant factor that will assist you in selling the furniture digitally would be the main heading or title of the product. The one thing that you need to keep in mind is to keep the title as small, simple and quick to remember as you can. Also, do not forget to add the focus keyword in your title.
Finally, make sure to keep the limit of characters in your mind. Also, if possible, then try to insert the name of your brand in the title only.
Product description
Finally, the product description comes in! Here you need to write convincing and attractive descriptions about your products.
Make sure to keep the below-mentioned points in your mind while writing good product descriptions:
- Keep the product description informative and short.
- Try to focus more on the target customers and their requirements with the product.
- Make use of the technical details about your product to make it even more informative.
- Try to make it as detailed as you can.
Set up your online furniture store
With all the above-mentioned steps, you can successfully make your website, but you need to turn that website into a store to sell furniture. So, to make your website into a store, you need to add the two following features:
Set up the payment:- Your furniture store should have all the famous payment options so that your customer doesn’t face any payment related issues. Also, show a clear indication of the charges before the process of billing.Here are the 5 best online payment gateway for small business in the UK.
Sort out shipping:- If you are running or hosting your e-commerce website, then you should have a quick, clear, reliable and simple track shipping service.
Remember that, if you are selling your furniture on a marketplace or hosting websites such as BigCommerce, Shopify etc. then you would not face any issue in setting up the shipping and payment gateways. The reason behind this is, they have their payment systems and logistics.
Promote your furniture
Now as you have finally set up your online furniture store, here comes the time to make people aware of it. For the online marketplace, you can begin by ensuring that you put the right and popular keywords in your content. Also, assure that you deliver the content as promised. Moreover, the higher reviews will result in a better ranking of your store, which, in turn, will bring more sales.
On the contrary, if you are hosting your eCommerce store, then you can make use of all the further mentioned methods to sell and promote your furniture digitally.
Social Media:- What’s even life without social media? I mean, almost everyone is there, so nothing can be better than promoting your products on social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Instagram and all such platforms have a high reach for all kinds of audiences. Pick the best fit according to your focus audience and allure them by posting about the products on the platform consistently.
SEO ranking:- The other method is by achieving a high SEO ranking. That means, being at the top of search results. For this, make sure to follow all the rules prescribed by Google such as making use of the right keywords in the title, meta descriptions, headings, URL and alt tag of the pictures. If you want to attract more local customers to your fashion website, you can use this local SEO guide. The tips mentioned in the guide can help you to optimise your website for the local traffic.
Running PPC ads:- TFinally, you can run Pay-Per-Click advertisements so that more and more people can see you. Besides, you will be charged only when someone clicks on your advertisements.
Moreover, you can run such kind of ads in the google search results as well as in the marketplace. However, if you do not know how to use it, then you can hire a specialist for it.
Update your Inventory
Here comes one of the most critical factors to sell your furniture online, it is to keep the inventory up to date. So many e-commerce stores do not succeed as they don’t pay attention to the product catalogue. They fail at updating their products according to the preferences and demands of their customers.
So, if you wish to stay in the furniture market for the long run. Then make sure to keep your products updated according to the below-mentioned filters.
Most popular products:- Always keep in mind to keep the most popular products in your stock. Besides, keep the particular products that are famous and also keep experimenting by introducing some different products as well, to check if people buy them or not.
Moreover, if you already have a huge customer base, then you can also add the products which are from the different niche of furniture, just to see the outcome and growth potential.
Rising requests and trends:- The next factor would be by adding those products which are not yet popular but show consistent growth. Also, make sure to keep your stock and inventory updated with all these products too.
If you find any same product that can go well with the popular products then you can add them too to see if people wish to buy it or not.
Conclusion
That’s all from our side, now is the time to wrap up this blog. In this blog, we have discussed everything that you need to know about selling the furniture online. We believe that this article helped and motivated you to sell your furniture online.
To conclude, we would say SEO is really important for your furniture store. Also, selling furniture through online mode means taking benefits of the opportunities available in the market as well as of the recent shifts in the B2B sales of the industry. So many furniture suppliers and manufacturers recognise the significance of eCommerce. Yet, they deliberately fail to present a good and proper shopping experience to their customers by offering the same catalogue of products.
Chances are, this gap in the market might become a game-changer for your furniture store if you follow the right strategies. However, if you still have any doubts, confusions or queries, then feel free to contact us at RVS Media Limited. Our team is right here at your service.