Selling furniture online can be an extremely lucrative business, but with some of the heftier price tags among e-commerce industries, many retailers are left wondering how to get consumers to buy more frequently. Luckily, there are a few ways to get that done, and strategies that increase conversion can also raise the size of an average consumer’s purchase, driving up profits even further.

To increase e-commerce furniture sales, business owners need multiple angles of attack. This means that every step of the purchase process needs to be refined, and these are the places that we think they should start:

• Cost transparency
• Clear checkout process
• Fast page speeds
• Flexible payment options like BNPL

Let’s dive into what each of these means and how business owners can implement them quickly and easily.

Cost Transparency

One major frustration of B2C and B2B furniture consumers is a lack of cost transparency for specialized or custom furniture or furniture sets when furnishing an entire home or office. Many websites will feature some of their most extravagant projects on the front page with no clear indication of what it would cost to buy.

Cost Transparency in B2C Furniture Sales

To improve B2C cost transparency, businesses should clearly show the costs for things like specific materials on custom furniture, shipping, staging (where applicable), and discounts on full furniture sets or bundles. Giving consumers a clear idea of what the bill will look like makes it easier for them to make a decision.

Cost Transparency in B2B Furniture Sales

To improve B2B cost transparency, businesses should always label any project photos with the amount that each project costs. So, if the front page is a display of three different offices or businesses that were supplied with sets of furniture, there should be a caption or tag on the corner of the image disclosing what the price for each of them was. This way, business owners immediately understand what size project they can afford.

Clear Checkout Process

One of the leading causes of cart abandonment is a difficult or disorganized checkout process. When consumers feel like their time is being wasted, they understandably get frustrated and are less likely to patronize that particular online store. With furniture purchases, there can be many steps to checking out, especially in B2B contexts, and furniture retailers should ensure that these steps are easy to navigate.

Ways to accomplish this include:

• Progress indicators to show consumers where they are in the checkout process.
• Product thumbnails to give them confidence that they have everything they need in their cart.
• Easy navigation between the cart and store, like leveraging a cart sidebar so consumers can see their cart while they shop.

By simplifying the checkout process, e-commerce furniture sales leaders will give consumers fewer reasons to abandon their cart.

Fast Page Speeds

Web optimization is all about making the purchase experience quick and easy. One of the best ways to decrease the time it takes to navigate a website is to ensure it is optimized for speed. This means minimizing the amount of content on each page so that they don’t take long to load. 

An easy way to do this is to break up a website into several different categories so that each page doesn’t get too large. When consumers are shopping, there should be a cap on the number of products that will be immediately displayed. This is why websites make consumers click a “show more results” button instead of just displaying every product on a  single page.

Product thumbnails aren’t the only thing that can slow down a webpage. Promo images and even text content elements like links, text boxes, and widgets also take time to load and will slow down a page if there are too many. To keep a page fast, site builders should keep content elements to a minimum.

Flexible Payment Options Like BNPL

Finally, the best way to increase sales and ticket size is to increase the consumer’s buying power. By offering POS financing, businesses are able to maximize every sales opportunity with the guarantee that consumers have enough funds for any purchase they’d like to make. While consumers have several ways to access financing themselves, businesses see an average 20-30% increase in conversion and a 30-50% increase in average ticket size if they offer it themselves.

But how can retailers offer consumer financing for their e-commerce furniture sales customers? 

It's as simple as finding the right fintech provider. There are many companies that offer financing products like consumer loans, branded credit cards, and BNPL payment plans. Each of these fits a different customer's needs, and getting a fintech provider that can offer all of them can immediately increase sales.

Increase E-Commerce Furniture Sales With Skeps

Skeps offers a comprehensive, end-to-end consumer financing program that helps businesses modernize their entire payment process. We go above and beyond one-click payment, also offering a one-click application process for several different types of consumer financing, including:

• BNPL
• Consumer loans and leases
• Branded credit cards

If you’re looking to partner with a forward-thinking fintech company that will keep consumers' eyes on the purchase while offering best-in-class financing, Skeps is the perfect fit.