Premise:
Along my journey, I owned a brick-and-mortar furniture store. The expense of running such a business is tremendous … leasing and staffing a large retail and warehouse space, filling them with inventory, making the showroom attractive, and promoting the store. Since then, I’ve been scratching my head as to how to operate an e-commerce Furniture business.
The Challenge:
It’s easy to sell small pieces of furniture online: items like coffee tables or side chairs that can be shipped by UPS. But there are at least 2 big challenges to selling large furniture online …
- Consumers like to touch and feel the furniture before they buy
- Large pieces are shipped by LTL trucks which deliver to the CURB, not to the DOOR.
For sure there are other challenges, but solve these 2 challenges and we may be able break into a huge opportunity.
The retail furniture industry in the US is $100 billion. Of that only 11% is sold online. The furniture industry has one of the smallest online penetration rates.