High prices, limited choices
For those of us who are old enough, cast your mind back to the world before the internet and e-commerce. Buying furniture meant dragging around from one store to another to see a limited choice of furniture – all of which was pretty expensive. The alternative was to visit one of the big chains like MFI or Courts and buy something more affordable, often made from chipboard and hardboard and probably flat pack.
Paving the way to online furniture sales
The internet provided a great opportunity. Unlike a traditional store a website showroom has no limits to its size – so customers can see as many different styles and types of furniture as the retailer can find. And because a website showroom has no running costs, like heating, lighting and rates the furniture can be offered at much lower prices.
Although Right Price Furniture was established as a traditional retailer its business model was specifically designed to incorporate selling furniture in this way. Many traditional furniture retailers said that customers would not buy furniture on the internet – but they were proved wrong and have since set up their own websites, proudly proclaiming their long histories. They are however, first and foremost, traditional stores (with traditional overheads) and this is reflected in their prices.
Furniture or firewood?
One of the big challenges for Right Price Furniture was that of supplying customers with the furniture they had ordered. Furniture is big, heavy and easily scratched, split or otherwise damaged in transit. Initially the company tried putting customers’ furniture onto pallets and wrapping it in polythene and cardboard for delivery by courier. The trouble was it often arrived badly damaged.
Making deliveries work
Deliveries were then undertaken in vans by the company’s own staff. Breakages and damage were minimised and customers were delighted at the quality of their purchases. The increase in popularity however meant long hours behind the wheel and an increasingly complex – and expensive – transport operation.
Today the company uses specialist delivery companies to supply its customers and achieves a 98% success rate in delivering furniture in good condition. Achieving a 100% success rate would significantly increase costs for all customers, so instead resources are allocated to making returns and replacement of damaged items as smooth as possible.
Cracking the code to make websites work
Setting up a website today is a relatively straightforward process – simple sites can be running in a matter of minutes – but being one of the first to actually sell, rather than just view, furniture online presented many technical challenges. Trying to compile a customer order that might have different furniture ranges, with different finishes on each item, different delivery times and different discount rates is not easy and requires complex coding and programming to work properly.
Find us on the internet
Having a website that customers could use to find and then order what they wanted was only part of the challenge. An equally important challenge is to help customers find the website in the first place by coming top in search engine listings.
Contrary to some people’s understanding of the internet, this doesn’t happen by chance! Right Price Furniture has invested £100,000s in developing and promoting its website and the furniture brands it sells. As a result this pioneering company, based on a South Wales Industrial Estate, is still one of the top online furniture retailers for the whole of the UK.
What furniture suppliers don’t want you to know
Of course selling quality furniture for lower prices has not been popular with everyone. Some very well-known furniture suppliers, acting under pressure from their traditional retailers, have set minimum prices (profit margins) at which they will allow their furniture to be sold.
Although this prevents customers from buying furniture at the lowest price threats to stop supplying non-compliant retailers means the practice continues. There is also the risk to suppliers themselves of fines and imprisonment for price-fixing – as has happened in other cases detailed by the OFT
Right furniture, right price
Right Price Furniture deplores such practices and, in the same way it lowered furniture prices by introducing selling on the internet, it aims to continue selling furniture for the very lowest prices. It has received support in this respect from an unexpected quarter – the rise of the internet ‘supermarket’ furniture stores.
Supermarket furniture stores
The appearance of Right Price Furniture and other internet furniture retailers offered more choice at lower cost to customers. This method of selling still allowed traditional retailers to compete simply by offering higher levels of personal service and, where they had the goods in stock, faster delivery times.
The supermarket furniture store buys furniture direct from factories in the Far East, South America or wherever it is cheapest. Selling direct to the public cuts out the UK suppliers altogether – in the same way supermarkets cut out food wholesalers in Britain in the 1970s and 80s.
Winners and Losers: the future for furniture sales
Supermarket furniture retailers offer customers good furniture at low prices – and such healthy competition keeps Right Price Furniture working hard to provide a better quality alternative at comparable prices. It will continue to do so using furniture sourced through UK suppliers.
Sadly the suppliers who try to swim against the tide by illegal price-fixing and similar measures will go the way of those food industry wholesalers. Traditional furniture retailers, left with no-one to supply them, will also be lost – in the same way the high street grocer has disappeared.