Ecommerce: The Future Of Furniture
Updated May 8th, 2020
When Henry Ford’s Quadricycle hit the cobblestone streets of Detroit in 1896 (only a mile away from where I sit now, writing this) people laughed. It was loud, only had two driving speeds, no reverse, no brakes and a doorbell for a horn.
It was also the future on wheels.
Imagine how ridiculous Ford appeared at first - zooming around town at a break-neck pace of twenty miles an hour, while safe and predictable horse-drawn carriages clopped along behind him.
All human beings resist change. It’s normal, and healthy. We didn’t make it this far on Planet Earth by trying every new thing we encounter. ‘Tried and true’ is a saying for a reason. But on occasion, an invention, an idea, or a person comes along and forever changes life as we know it. Rocketing us forward, whether we’re ready or not.
Is your tried and true business model fading?
As a furniture supplier, you have a tried and true business model for selling your product - but the rapid evolution of the market may be necessitating an innovation to that model. Amber Engine’s entire reason for being is to empower innovation, so hang on because big change is coming!
Forbes recently released an article predicting the increased growth of ecommerce in the retail sector in 2020, as a result of coronavirus, as people increasingly avoid physical shopping environments in favor of a more sterile digital marketplace.
What's more, retail analysts state that increased ecommerce sales due to external factors, such as holidays, tend to lead to step (lasting) changes in consumer behavior (eMarketer 2020).
Andrew Lipsman, Principal Analyst at eMarketer, says, “During the holiday, a time with more concentrated buying activity, consumers spend more online creating a step-change, meaning the consumer may not return to past behavior. We may see this type of similar behavior unfold over the next few months.”
In other words: Once people start shopping a category online, they're likely to continue.
This all boils down to one thing: ecommerce is the future of furniture. If your brand doesn’t have a strategy in place, you’re in danger of being left behind in the new normal, just like the horse and buggy of yesteryear.
The Hard Part of Ecommerce:
But you might be wondering how you can break into this growing channel when you lack the staff and expertise.
As you may know: Preparing hundreds (or thousands) of new items (and all the product information that goes along with them) for ecommerce is no small feat.
A typical ecommerce team is constantly struggling to compile and maintain an up to date catalog from disparate spreadsheets, dropbox accounts, FTP folders, and other content repositories. When (if) they get what they need, the product content in the spreadsheets (like images, SKUs, descriptions, and features) are often incomplete.
Someone has to take responsibility for collecting these spreadsheets from many different stakeholders, and then figure out an organized way to store the information they’ve gathered.
Then the team spends hours fixing errors and omissions and trying to format the data to work for various ecommerce channels. These tasks are never complete because product updates happen on a regular basis.
It’s next to impossible to successfully run an ecommerce campaign - much less do so strategically - if you’re still managing your product information the old way.
When the Ecommerce Giants Take Over:
But that’s not all. In addition to the complexity and expense of managing ecommerce for your brand, you also know that existing online retail giants, like Wayfair and Amazon, are already dominating furniture ecommerce sales.
After all, Wayfair and Amazon together captured 63% of online furniture sales as of 2019, according to data analytics firm 1010data, which tracks online sales via credit and debit card transitions. This number will have of course increased as a result of the coronavirus in 2020.
You have a two-pronged problem:
Ecommerce requires skilled staff and expertise that you don’t have.
Established online retail giants have already cornered the ecommerce market for furniture.
What’s a sensible furniture supplier to do?
Fortunately, Amber Engine anticipated the challenges faced by suppliers trying to learn the ropes of selling directly to consumers online. We’ve been quietly working in the background to build the precise solutions you need to solve your toughest ecommerce problems.
Are you ready to switch from the horse and buggy to an automobile?
Amber Engine makes it easy to centralize, collaborate on, and deploy your product information in a single place with our product information management software (PIM). Our PIM was built specifically for the needs of home furnishings suppliers who are trying to crack ecommerce.
Our solution is simple:
Rather than fighting the macro-trends in the industry, we help you swim with the current by easily preparing your products to be sold on established marketplaces like Wayfair, Amazon, hayneedle, houzz, Overstock, and many others. After organizing everything in a collaborative space all of your teams can access, our PIM allows you to export your product information directly to templates for these marketplaces.
Still, even with technical issues out of the way, we can’t ignore the fact that you probably lack the skilled staff necessary to execute and scale a successful ecommerce plan. That is precisely why we now offer comprehensive ecommerce services. Whether your product catalog is filled with errors, is incomplete, or needs romance copy or image editing, we’ve got you covered. Our ecommerce services team can prepare your entire catalog to be ecommerce marketplace ready.
That means you can start selling successfully online in weeks rather than months or years.
To learn more about Amber Engine’s PIM software and comprehensive ecommerce services, visit this page.