How to Sell Furniture Items Online

Whether you are looking to sell used items to free up space at home and change your decor, or you are craftsmen with a small business that produces furniture, selling furniture online is undoubtedly an activity that embraces all your needs and goals, while at the same time offering a profit opportunity worthy of a truly large and always very active market.

However, before starting your online sales activity, it will be necessary to outline a path that guides us in this operation.

In the following, we will explore the fundamental points and characteristics of this type of business, the market, the strategies that can be used for selling, and then creating the online shop with which to start selling, also thanks to the Framework360 platform that we will see later on.

• Know and study the market

• How to sell: useful tips

• Where to sell

Know and study the market 

In recent years, the furniture sector has recorded a boom in purchases, leading to online furniture shopping becoming one of the most widespread behaviors among users who browse the web. With each passing year, more people prefer to choose furnishings for their home on the best e-commerce sites in the sector, rather than in physical stores.

This significant growth at a global level owes its beginnings to what is the sector of design itself, which we certainly invite you to explore and study, in order to always have at hand the most useful information and the most interesting ideas for your business.

Studying the market in which you are operating and staying updated on design trends and the latest fashions will help not only to ensure that your e-commerce can be one of the most interesting around, but also more practically in choosing and selecting items to sell.

We therefore advise you, in addition to browsing on social pages, to consult international design blogs, such as Apartment Therapy, or Design Hunter, and similar ones, to always keep an eye on market changes and trends.

How to sell: useful tips

To be successful with your e-commerce, it will not be enough to have products that are interesting for the market and a catalog updated on the latest designs, but you will also need to know how to move effectively across multiple fronts and leverage all the resources that you might find useful for your growth.

Here are some tips and points you could focus on:

• The customer base: it is essential to know your customers and their habits, including everything related to the customer journey, and be able to study it by collecting data even with analysis tools like Google trends, which will help you stay updated on the latest consumer trends through Google's insights and search network statistics.

• Support: related to customer service is support, extremely important not to abandon the customer and equally for the growth of the business itself, thanks to a good reputation and positive reviews.

• Means of communication: it is also important to find suitable methods to reach the audience of customers and communicate with them, always keeping in mind the type of target we are aiming at (e.g., age, income, etc...), equipping oneself with appropriate platforms, such as social networks, and ensuring that communication can be available on multiple devices (mobile, desktop, etc...).

Besides having to create high-quality content for marketing and acquiring more traffic to your website and social media profiles, you will also need to pay special attention to developing an effective method and procedure for the shipping of furniture, especially in light of potential purchases from abroad.

We therefore advise you to evaluate prices and offers from couriers in your area, to agree on a rate based on your sales plan, and thus outline the shipping cost for the items on sale.

Moreover, it will be advantageous for you to ship items disassembled, particularly those that are large in size, and always ensure the highest possible quality and efficiency, especially in this area.

Where to sell

There are now many dedicated sales platforms, and you can sell with complete freedom either by relying on large marketplaces such as Amazon, or Subito and eBay, especially if it concerns second-hand items, or through websites specifically dedicated to this sector, for example by registering your company with Houzz, a software for architecture and an online community devoted to the furnishing sector.

We also recommend that you consider the sales sections of the social networks themselves, such as IG Shop or even better Facebook Marketplace, where a large market for new and second-hand furniture is concentrated.

An additional method of selling that we suggest is through your own personal e-commerce site, which you can create, set up, and manage as you like, thanks to the Framework360 platform. Let's see how now.

Selling with Framework360

Framework360 is the first complete platform for digital marketing, which will help you to create and manage your personal e-commerce site through numerous but intuitive screens and windows, in total autonomy of choice.

This will indeed give you the opportunity to access a customization section with all the tools to configure your personal website.

After comfortably registering at the following link and having thus created your environment, you will be ready to start.

Let's see how to do this now.

After creating an account and registering your environment, you will have the possibility to install a specific plugin for e-commerce among the many offered by the platform, and begin to customize and manage your site preferences in a simple and intuitive way thanks to the navigation menu on the left.

To know more details about all the steps for creating an e-commerce site, we invite you to consult our short guide already available on our blog:

 — How to Open an E-commerce Site with Framework360

For now, let's explore some features that might be immediately useful for setting up our online sales business.

Listing Items for Sale

After installing the plugin, adding items will be very simple thanks to the dedicated section. 

On the left side of the screen, it will indeed be possible to find the aforementioned section as shown in the image, where products can be added using the appropriate button.

Once that is done, we will find ourselves on the actual page, ready to receive all the information we want to correlate with our article: from the image to the name itself, from the price to availability in stock and to the description (available in more or less detail).

The settings, as you can see, are numerous and offer us the opportunity to set up a varied and detailed shop, both in terms of basic information and for more specific details and any promotions and discounted products.

To return to the topic of customer support, we also suggest you take a quick look at the forms section.

Forms and Cross-Sell

In order not to neglect customer support, therefore, the “Form” section will be extremely useful for this purpose. It consists of a module that can be used by customers and visitors of the site to contact us, which is essentially a classic contact form, present on every respectable site that cares about customer service.

To create it, simply click on "add" and from there we can modify it as we like.

For a more detailed list of all the editable sections, we invite you to watch the quick video on the subject, already available on our YouTube channel - Forms Framework360.

Now that we have also seen some of the most useful and immediate features of the platform, we are ready to properly study our business plan and sell furniture items through our new e-commerce site,

Good start!