During the past few years, selling furniture online seems to be the quickest way to make a profit. By falling in the right hands, it can become a fruitful business. However, before you start building your furniture websites, answer these questions first:
- What is your plan for setting up your furniture websites?
- Do you need any technical skills or a unique style for your business plan?
- Where and when to start your furniture business?
If you don’t have a proper answer that can cover those questions, this article will help you. In this blog, we will provide you with important features for the furniture store and successful online furniture examples. Besides, this post shows you how to step by steps to build a successful furniture store.
The website features specific to online the furniture selling
- Layered navigation is a must-have feature, still an absolute must for furniture web websites. As a rule, shoppers have an idea of what furniture pieces they are seeking (at least regarding color, price range, and size) and will appreciate the possibility to filter a large catalog out against various criteria.
- Interactive UI: The user interface should be good enough to improve the customer experience. It considers all the visual, interactive factors of a product interface—such as buttons, icons, spacing, typography, color schemes, and responsive design.
- Visual product builders: If you provide shoppers a possibility to style furniture pieces and select the best-suited color or configuration, enable them to visualize the result immediately too.
- Item availability: Supply chains are in disruption around the globe. Orders are backed up weeks to months. And many companies are limiting inventory to maintain revenue flow. Retail stores around the country needed a quick method to identify which products their customers could actually buy. But many were left without a solution. Leaving shoppers to inquire or buy a product that is months away from delivery. Generating mass confusion and dissatisfaction among retail customers.
- Easy-to-use manuals: The user experience doesn’t end with an order– you need to take care of trouble-free delivery and after-purchase communication. What’s more, if you sell self-assembly furniture, customers expect you detailed instructions on how to put together and use furniture pieces. Most often, downloadable manuals are utilized for this purpose but some retailers provide customer convenience even further and offer AR-powered assembly instructions.
How to build a furniture eCommerce website?
1. Find the right e-commerce website builder for your furniture websites
If you want to build a professional and trustworthy brand for your furniture store, consider an eCommerce website builder. Think of an e-commerce website builder like a piece of really high-quality flat-pack furniture – with all the tools included. You can easily put together an impressive piece. And nobody will know it came with an instruction book rather than a hefty price tag.
The e-commerce platform that will definitely be suitable for your e-commerce furniture business is undoubtedly Magento. Easy to customize, have tons of features, and great support is more than enough for building your furniture websites. Also, a free trial is included, so your choice will be variable. By budgeting for an e-commerce builder, that’s exactly what you’re doing for the first step.
2. Sign up for a premium plan
Once you’ve found the perfect match, it’s time to be further ahead and register a premium plan. For all builders, the general rule is the more you pay, the more advanced tools your business gets. Depending on the platform version you choose, the price may vary. Costs of unmanaged hosting for Magento Open Source start from $10 and can reach up to $250 per month. The price for managed hosting starts at around $190 per month.
For websites developed on Magento Commerce, the price for managed hosting starts from $500 per month for dedicated servers. The Magento Commerce Cloud version is hosted on the cloud, so the hosting costs are already included in the license. So the scale of your site is the breadwinner of your furniture websites. Choose wisely.
3. Choose a domain name
A domain name is your website’s address and is how people recognize and find your furniture websites. It’s part of your website’s identity – for example, ours is www.magesolution.com. Domain names don’t come for free, but they’re definitely worth the investment. They vary in price but usually average out at around $20 per year. You’ll definitely be doing your online furniture store a favor by choosing and securing a domain. It looks professional, earns trust from visitors, and even does wonders for getting found in search engine results.
Some tips to choose a perfect domain for your furniture websites:
- Keep it simple: Make sure you pick a domain that is easy to remember, usually the purpose of your site is widely considered.
- Keep it short: Don’t create a long or complicated address, no one will remember it.
- Keep it clear of number and hyphens: Numbers and hyphens aren’t ideal for domains, because it gets clunky and pretty confusing for your site.
- Keep it relevant: This is an obvious one, but it’s easy to be off-topic by your thought. Stand out, but don’t be off guard.
- Keep it catchy: By creating an easy-to-remember, rhythmic and should-be-in-order, your website will be widely acknowledged.
4. Pick and customize a template
To create your online store, you’ll need to pick a template. This is basically the structure for a page layout, filled with example images and text to help you see its potential. It’s like viewing a house – you can see where the light fittings are, and where the current owners have put the TV. But once you move in, you can replace everything with your own stuff. Once you’ve picked your template, you’ll need to make it yours.
You don’t need a degree in design to make your site totally your own. With e-commerce website builders, it’s easy as pie. We – MageSolution offers Supro – Minimalist AJAX Magento 2 Theme. is a clean & minimal AJAX Magento 2 Theme suitable for online stores. With standard UI/UX design and a magnificent focus on products, Supro will make your furniture websites look more impressive and attractive to viewers.
5. Add your furniture for your furniture websites
This is the time to add your furniture and show the world what you’ve got to offer. There are a lot of things to think about, and these are the major features to consider:
- Write a compelling product description: You need your product description to give customers all the information they want to know. This means you need to be informative.
- Take quality photos: Nobody is going to buy a sofa if it’s lurking in the gloom of a bad photo. Your photo quality should be on the top, with clear and crystalline color. Take photos from different angles, and make them big enough to see on your website.
- Set a sensible price: Pricing will depend on a lot of things. However, don’t do these: overprice and undersell your products. Your prices should reflect the quality of the furniture you’re selling.
- Categorize your furniture: Categories – or collections, as they’re also called – are so important. It’s up to you how you want to categorize your products, but it should be logical, clear, and consistent.
6. Set up your payment
The good news is, once your store goes live, all that hard work will pay off – literally. To accept through your website, you need to choose a provider and enable transactions. The main thing is to choose a payment gateway that will benefit your customers the most. Also, you can set up multiple payment methods.
Setting up your payment method may sound technical, but you can do it with just a few clicks. Moreover, double-checking your chosen payment method is of utmost importance. This will ensure the security and flexibility of your customer’s payments.
7. Sort out your shipping settings
By now, your online furniture store is almost ready to go. There’s just one last thing to sort out: shipping. First things first – you need somewhere to ship from. The shipping origin will set up how taxes and shipping are calculated, especially in real-time situations. You can ship from your own backyard, your workshop, an office, or you can use a fulfillment warehouse. However, this decision really depends on the size and volume of the products you’re selling.
Think about where you’ll be shipping to. You can set shipping zones that have different rates applied to them. These can be ZIP/postcodes, states, or even whole countries. You can add more zones as you grow, or delete zones you no longer want to ship to. Customers outside these zones will not be eligible for shipping. Also, there are different types of shipping you can offer for your furniture websites. It’s best to make any shipping costs clear from the start.
8. Preview, test, and launch your online furniture websites
This is super easy to do – e-commerce website builders have a “Preview” button that lets you view your store as if it were life. Now is the time to spot any glitches, images that won’t load, or any links which don’t work. Keep an eye out for any details you might have missed so far – double-check your store settings, and make sure the language and currency match. Always keep your contact details up to date – things might have changed.
Get colleagues, friends, and family to use your furniture websites. Get them to test the checkout and read through your product descriptions. Make sure you’ve got a smooth and seamless customer journey. If you can catch any minor errors before your store goes live, you’ll appear a lot more professional and trustworthy to potential buyers.
9. Promote your furniture websites
Now’s the time to take to the virtual rooftops and shout about your online store for all to hear. You’ve put all that love and care into your furniture websites. However, people aren’t going to magically flock to buy your products. You have to make them come to you.
E-commerce website builders know that marketing is key for growing your business and provide built-in tools to help you promote your furniture. From newsletters to social sharing, you’ve got a world of powerful marketing tools at your fingertips. By combining a bit of SEO, some multichannel selling, and top-notch email marketing, you’ll be the talk of the virtual furniture town.
10. Manage your inventory on your furniture websites
Inventory tracking is where you monitor your stock levels and keep track of which products. One disappointed customer is one too many, so managing your inventory is vital. If you have a large range of products, this can sound pretty full-on. That’s where choosing an eCommerce website builder, especially Magento, can be a lifesaver.
With Magento, you can automate some of the really important and time-consuming tasks. For example, once a stock level reaches zero, that item will automatically be labeled as “Out of Stock” on your storefront. This platform, therefore, is considered to be one of the top choices for managing stock levels. Having super powerful inventory systems to make your life easy is the thing Magento always has.
Successful online furniture stores examples
Blu Dot
Blu Dot does a great example with product visuals – high-resolution header pictures across the width of the pages entice shoppers. Besides, the detailed photos on the product pages permit customers to fully examine the furniture they are interested in.
IKEA
The next amazing website is IKEA. Of course, the Swedish furniture giant needs no introduction but some may overlook just how well-designed its website truly is. The site comes with a wealth of resources for its customers and guides potential shoppers seamlessly and intuitively through the buying journey.
Hermann Miller
Hermann Miller is one of the best furniture website examples. This website is famous mostly for its chairs, so the focus is on them. The cards with the other product bear the continuous color scheme.
Cult Furniture
The eco-trend will never go out of fashion. Everyone wants to be fit, eat healthily and purchase furniture made from eco-materials. Also, the Green and brown hues are an appealing combination for a company that positions itself as eco-friendly. An effective solution is a “play” button in the center of a banner that stops the banner from playing.
Target
Another great example of home design is the Target furniture eCommerce website. This giant delivers a myriad of products yet still has a very easy UX and the ability to sort and filter products. It’s a great example of how a brick-and-mortar operation successfully established itself as an eCommerce as well.
Conclusion
If you also wish to develop such a furniture eCommerce website for your business then you can definitely share the requirements with us. At Magesolution we offer Magento Website Development, Shopify Website Development, or Bigcommerce Website Development which cover both the technical and strategic aspects of your eCommerce site’s performance, ensuring a branded, customer-centric, engaging digital shopping experience that delivers results. Let’s talk to our experts for help with building an eCommerce strategy. Whether it’s a quick fix or a global omnichannel project, we’ve got all the bricks you need to build a robust eCommerce website.
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