FurnitureFind.com finds move to online sales easier than expected

Although its web site launched in 1996, home furnishings retailer FurnitureFind.com long avoided web sales for fear of complicated and expensive returns. But since it started offering e-commerce sales last December, it has found that e-commerce has led to fewer returns and is moving to broadly expand its online presence, director of web services Cory Nielsen tells Internet Retailer.

With an average ticket of about $2,000, he adds, FurnitureFind.com had been skittish about letting shoppers order and pay for products directly online. Instead, it used its web site as an informational brochure that referred shoppers to its contact center for help from customer service reps in placing orders.

But since going live with e-commerce sales last December, the retailer has been surprised at how well shoppers can serve themselves and place orders that result in successful shipments. “Orders coming through our web site shopping cart have a lower return rate than our call center orders,” Nielsen says.

FurnitureFind.com is continuing to build out its e-commerce strategy, both on its own site as well as through an expanding network of affiliates. To help keep down its return rate while helping shoppers find what they want, it’s working with site search firm Endeca Technologies Inc. to develop a site and navigation feature that will let shoppers drill down by product attributes.

But it’s also looking at a broader picture of long-term growth in sales through affiliates. Working with Mercent Corp., a company that helps retailers transmit merchandising content to affiliates, FurnitureFind has been better able to manage multiple selling relationships with e-marketplaces and comparison shopping sites including Amazon.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag.com, PriceGrabber.com, Yahoo Shopping and others.

After having started only with Amazon as a selling partner, FurnitureFind was looking at the onerous task of sending and updating its product files to multiple partner sites. “When we began looking at going after other marketplaces, we realized it would be a big programming project for us,” Nielsen says. “We would have had to build custom data feeds to each one and that would have been a full-time job.”

But with more than 8,000 SKUs from more than 100 manufacturers, FurnitureFind wants to move beyond just selling through Amazon and the comparison shopping sites, Nielsen says. So it’s planning to use Mercent to also connect with other merchants that want to add home furnishings to their consumer products offerings.

Unlike the comparison shopping sites, which let shoppers link directly to FurnitureFind.com to place an order, these other retail partners would follow the Amazon model, where they would both present product information from FurnitureFind and process the shopping cart transaction, then forward the order to FurnitureFind.com for fulfillment.

“We want to be in the business of adding value to other merchants’ sites,” Nielsen says.