How to Increase Online Furniture Sales: 6 Tips to Remember

Is selling furniture online a viable business? The numbers speak for themselves.

In 2019 and 2020, ecommerce revenue from home furnishings grew by 10 percent and represented a whopping 12.3 percent of all ecommerce sales. The global furniture market alone was worth around $510 billion and growing.

That upward trend shows no signs of stopping. By 2024, online furniture sales are expected to top $54.23 billion.

With the pandemic having deeply and permanently changed the way consumers shop, people have proven they’re not shy about ordering something like a futon or a bed online.

There’s no better time for furniture businesses to take advantage of this major shift to online shopping.

6 Easy Steps to Boosting Digital Furniture Sales 

It might seem counterintuitive, but selling furniture online is easier than you think.

Whether you’re shifting to purely digital operations or looking to harness ecommerce to improve your in-store sales, you’re in the right place. Follow these steps to increase digital sales in your furniture business and be ready for the market’s future growth.

1. Identify Your Target Market

When you start to brainstorm your marketing strategy, it might seem like a good idea to get your products in front of as many eyeballs as possible. After all, that’s what huge sites like Wayfair and IKEA do, right?

Wrong.

Furniture tastes, like fashion tastes, vary from person to person. Unless you truly have something for everyone, it’s best to identify your target market and position yourself so that the right people find you online.

Remember: 10 interested people are much more valuable than 100 uninterested ones.

Here are a few things you can do to identify your target market:

• Create your ideal buyer personas. Identify the type of person most likely to buy your furniture. Map out their preferences, pain points, and demographic information to figure out where you’d most likely find them online and what messages will resonate best.
• Connect your furniture with a lifestyle. Just like IKEA connects itself with clean, modern Swedish sensibilities, you’ll need to identify what vibe your furniture creates and connect it with the lifestyle of your buyer personas.
• Look at what your competitors are doing. If another business out there seems to be outperforming you, spend some time studying how they are positioning themselves. It may also help you identify potential markets they’ve missed.

2. Make Use of Social Media

Before the pandemic, 91 percent of businesses were already using social media to promote their goods and services.

During the pandemic, social media proved a true lifeline for many businesses. Its vital use will continue.

You can use social media to do things like:

• Help people peruse your physical store remotely
• Build a community around a topic or the lifestyle your furniture expresses
• Announce sales, clearance items, or new items
• Collect user-generated content from happy customers tagging your brand with their latest purchase

3. Create Useful, Consistent Content

Of course, social media won’t help you if you don’t have content that your customers want and at the level of quality they expect. 

Useful, consistent content can help keep audiences interested and customers returning. We recommend that you:

• Focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to produce fewer posts at a higher quality than it is to annoy everyone with borderline spam content.
• Give your readers behind-the-scenes glimpses. Does your furniture business have a unique story? Share it! Give people a look at the human element behind the brand.
• Find your target audience’s parallel interests. For example, is your furniture very minimalist? Attract potential customers with content that promotes the minimalist lifestyle.

4. Harness Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the strategy of making your content easy to find in Google. It involves using keywords in your content plus things like meta tags or alt text for images.

Get SEO right, and you’ll always appear at the top of the list when someone searches for a furniture business carrying the types of products you sell. 

SEO is a huge topic, but here are a few things you can do to help increase sales in a furniture business. Do:

• Take advantage of cheaper, long-tail keywords that your competitors aren’t using.
• Use local keywords for customers seeking furniture businesses near them.
• Structure your content with plenty of headings to make articles easy for people and search robots to read.

5. Make Your Website as Excellent as Your Furniture

Got a website that looks like it’s from the mid-1990s? 

Your customers will assume your furniture is, too. 

These days, bad aesthetics and bad poor performance will drive away almost everyone. According to some research, 52 percent of users won’t return to a site if they don’t like the way it looks. Think With Google once found that a page that takes more than a second to load sees its bounce rate jump by 123 percent.

However, having a fantastic website isn’t just a matter of presenting your best side. It also directly impacts your customer’s online shopping experience. Make it a good one by:

• Optimizing for mobile. The majority of search traffic comes from smartphones these days, so make sure your site is easy to navigate and allows shoppers to complete their purchases all from their mobile device. 
• Making important information accessible. From information about your return policy to localized currencies or languages, make sure shoppers can find what they need to feel confident about their purchase. 
• Offering product customization. Buying a piece of furniture is a big decision for most people. Each piece needs to match a shopper’s home and personal style. Allowing your customers to co-create their ideal sofa, armchair, or headboard will help you increase sales and customer loyalty. 
• Providing a stellar product customization experience. Many inexpensive plugins allow you to offer basic product customization options. But for high-ticket furniture items, we recommend that you seek out a premium product customization platform like ConfigureID that gives your customers more customization options and a superior user experience.

6. Sell an Experience, Not a Product

Your products will invariably become a part of a person’s life, whether it’s used at home, in the office, or in another context entirely. Take advantage of that to boost your sales.

Rather than selling a product, sell the experience your customers will get when they purchase your furniture.

For example, Serena & Lily sells the resort experience. Its ecommerce and physical stores feel like a dreamy vacation getaway, and the use of white-washed walls and brightly lit spaces create an airy, relaxed vibe.

In contrast, Zara Home sells a journey into the Old World. It uses earthy materials and modern shapes to create a rustic yet refined space.

At the end of the day, people buy furniture because of how it transforms a space and how it makes them feel. Help them visualize that by illuminating the experience they’ll get.

Showcase Your Style With ConfigureID

There are many ideas out there on how to increase sales in the furniture business, especially if you’re breaking into the digital space. Whether you’re shifting to ecommerce or supporting an in-store experience with a thoughtful digital presence, we’re confident that these six tips will help you succeed.

Ready to transform your furniture business’ online presence with incredible product personalization? Request a demo now to learn how ConfigureID can help.