Several Web purveyors specialize in such goods as office desks and computer tables. Fourteen CEOs rate the online dealers.
As long as people insist on sitting in a chair before they will seriously consider buying it, the Internet is unlikely to become the ultimate destination for furniture shoppers. "There will always be people who want to kick the tires," says Jeff Quinn, a senior analyst at Gomez, a Lincoln, Mass., consulting company that tracks online markets. That law of human nature is just one reason, according to Quinn, that only a scant 0.7% of the $189 billion in U.S. retail furniture sales today are transacted online.
If Aunt Bessie prefers to buy her chintz-covered love seat in the fluorescent glow of a furniture store, fair enough. But what about a small-business owner who's in the market for some durable office desks?
For years many small businesses have ordered their office furniture sight unseen (not counting photos) through catalogs. "As long as there's a good warranty and the price is right, it's done," says Farid Gazor, who three years ago launched a company offering E-commerce software to furniture dealers and manufacturers, reasoning that the Web could make their old-line industry more efficient. In the process of building that business Gazor discovered that companies with 5 to 250 employees were a neglected -- and promising -- market segment. Compared with large companies, small businesses "were much more ready to adopt a more efficient way of buying furniture," he says. So in January 1999 Gazor transformed his company into NextOffice, an online office-furniture purveyor in San Francisco that targets small companies.
Gazor is hardly alone in pursuing an office-furniture E-commerce niche. Some manufacturers, such as Herman Miller and Knoll, have recently come around to the idea of selling online. Their Web sites, of course, offer only the products they manufacture. In contrast, eclectic sites in the NextOffice mold have sprung up to sell the furniture of many competing brands. (NextOffice, for example, carries the wares of more than 90 manufacturers.) With the dot-coms, furniture typically is delivered from the manufacturer's warehouse to the customer's door by trucks that are under contract to the site.
The cyberspace merchants also tend to have a lot of furniture-industry experience. Rich Peterson, who cofounded Officefurniture.com, based in Danville, Calif., is a former furniture distributor with 18 years in the field. Another site, OfficebyDesign.com, is the virtual version of a 12-year-old Cleveland office-furniture dealership, TodaysOffice. A third, Office Furniture USA (www.ofusa.com), is a network of 145 furniture stores around the country. The sites' customers are mostly small businesses with fewer than 200 employees. No customer is too small: the sites say they're pleased to deal with soloists and home-office workers.
The online office-furniture sellers seem to adhere to an unwritten E-commerce pricing dictum: Thou shalt not discount. The prices listed on the sites, several of their owners acknowledged, are similar to what retailers charge. The owners say they aim to compete with brick-and-mortar stores not by cutting prices but by providing such Internet-enhanced features as quick access to a wide variety of products and real-time information on inventory and order status. "Customers have more choices," Peterson declares flatly.
So if you decide that the Internet is a place to hunt for office furniture, where should you look? Inc. asked 14 small-company CEOs to evaluate seven Web sites specializing in online sales of office furniture. Our panelists judged the sites by value and selection as well as other criteria. Although they didn't go so far as to order any furniture, they did simulate a shopper's experience, sampling such things as the sites' customer- service responses.
Here's what the panelists found:
www.furniture-online.com
What it's good for: Hardly anything, said three of the four CEOs who evaluated the site. However, the fourth CEO lauded the site's "broad selection, ease of use, and rapid and thorough customer service."
Don't waste your time if: You like to browse. One of the site's weakest points is "its lack of a sitewide navigation system that shows shoppers where they are and where they can go," one CEO noted.
What our CEOs had to say: The reviewers felt the site lacked sophistication. "My two-year-old son could design a better site," sniped the harshest critic.
What you ought to know: Of the seven sites evaluated for this column, this one had the highest restocking charge for returned goods, a fee of 20% to 25% of the purchase price for certain items. "The manufacturers will charge me a restocking fee of 20%, and then I have to eat the freight," explains Furniture-Online.com CEO Art Fiala. "Some companies won't take a chair back at all."
www.nextoffice.com
What it's good for: Interactive personal attention. If you fill out a form and send it to the company's professional space planners, they'll set up a private site for you with sample layouts for your office. Live chats and E-mail support are also available. "They answered my question promptly and adequately," noted one CEO.
Don't waste your time if: You prefer plain vanilla to banana splits. The site specializes in high-end goods. "Its furnishings did not interest me at all," said one no-nonsense reviewer.
What our CEOs had to say: High-tech bells and whistles complement images of fancy furniture on this site. Reviewers praised what one called a "standout feature," a device that changes pictures of items to show them with different wood finishes or fabric colors.
What you ought to know: You won't know how much you'll owe in delivery charges until you reach the checkout page.
