Our 7 tips for selling furniture online

More and more furniture manufacturers and retailers are turning to the internet to sell their products. It’s a trend that was already noticeable last year, but the furniture market in 2021 will shift considerably towards digital, as the pandemic has turned consumer habits upside down.

Many manufacturers have failed to relay their growth online. Selling furniture online is not something you can improvise. You have to identify all possible sales channels and respect all formats and constraints. As buyers can’t touch or test furniture, this has added an extra layer of difficulty, forcing manufacturers to be even more innovative.

To make matters worse, competition from giants like Amazon leaves little room for newcomers. If you want to break through, you’ll need to stand out from the crowd and make yourself known. To succeed in convincing your customers, you’ll need an impeccable, attractive and entertaining presentation. To make your digital transition a success, you’ll need to embrace 3D and the digital world.

Studio 3D has been creating visuals for furniture professionals for several years now. We are thus able to identify the needs of furniture manufacturers and provide them with the solution best suited to their requirements. There’s no shortage of ideas for selling furniture on the Internet. Here are the 7 most effective!

#1 – Publish an exhaustive description of your furniture

For selling furniture online ,your products must be described in great detail. Simply because your customers won’t be able to ask you any questions! All possible information should be included in the product description.

This technical description should be accompanied by an introduction presenting the main advantages of the piece of furniture. And, of course, all this text should be accompanied by photos of the furniture from every angle. 3D lets you create as many renderings as you like, from every possible angle, zooming in on the material if necessary, or designing a 360° viewer.

By not asking any technical or aesthetic questions, you’ll remove any barriers your customers might have and get them to click on the “Buy” button!

#2 – Implement cross-selling techniques

When your prospects arrive on your website, they must stay there at all costs. Just like in a physical store, they must leave with a purchase under their arm. And just like in a store, you need to know how to track the user’s path, test a variety of banners just like headers, offer promotions, present a bestseller on the home page, hold the visitor back at the last moment with a pop-up featuring a special offer…

And always present your furniture with striking, attractive, entertaining visuals. The only way to sell furniture on the Internet is visually. Your customers aren’t sensitive to the music playing on the shelves, or to a synthetic perfume that’s supposed to relax them and encourage them to buy… On the web, everything happens visually. And you’ve got to show them what you’re all about, so they’ll notice you, appreciate you and buy from you.

#3 – Make noise on networks for selling furniture online

Social networks are perfect for reaching your customers where they are. Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook: each allows you to reach your customers when they’re most relaxed and therefore!, most receptive. But to get noticed, you’ll need visuals that are irresistible, that compel to be shared.
But an occasional post with a nice visual is unfortunately not enough to sell furniture on the Internet. You need to build a long-term publishing strategy and post regularly. With 3D visualization, you can reuse furniture models over and over again. All you have to do is order a new atmosphere to obtain new material for distribution. In this way, you can sign up for orders that are delivered over time – allowing you to remind Internet users of your work on a regular basis.

But an occasional post with a nice visual is unfortunately not enough to sell furniture on the Internet. You need to build a long-term publishing strategy and post regularly. With 3D visualization, you can reuse furniture models over and over again. All you have to do is order a new atmosphere to obtain new material for distribution. In this way, you can sign orders that are delivered over time – allowing you to remind Internet users of your products on a regular basis.

#4 – Emphasize furniture quality

selling furniture online: use white rendering and 3D modeling
As a furniture manufacturer or retailer, you’ve undoubtedly come up against the major difficulty of selling furniture on the Internet: presenting all the qualities of a piece of furniture through photos alone. As mentioned above, customers can’t touch, sit or try out the various functions of a piece of furniture. You have to use visuals to underline the quality of your products.

To meet this need, Le Studio 3D can reproduce furniture textures to perfection, and zoom in on certain details in 4K. 3D modeling can go as far as reproducing the seams of a sofa or the grain of a piece of wood. As you can see from this visual (whose resolution is only 1080p), the texture rendering is very similar to the original.

#5 – Selling furniture online: stand out with augmented reality (AR)

I’m sure you share the view that providing an original user experience is a great way to stand out from the competition. Ikea was one of the first to use AR, and many other players have since jumped on the bandwagon.

However, although this technology initially required a substantial budget, the development of numerous start-ups – notably French – has reduced the cost of implementation. You can now offer your customers, via an application or sometimes directly from your website, to visualize the furniture in their home using their phone. This feat allows customers to visualize the furniture in its environment, giving them a precise idea of the space it will take up and how it will fit in with the current décor.

To work, augmented reality requires :

• A parameterized application, supplied by specialized application developers
• Furniture models in a specific format (.gltf), which requires different processing when modeled. Find out more about this and the cost of 3D modeling in this article).

#6 – Made-to-measure furniture boosts internet sales

It’s a growing trend: extreme customization is all the rage. If you’re into custom manufacturing, the 3D configurator is a must. Here again, you’ll need to call on 2 service providers: one to supply the software solution and the other to produce all the 3D required to visualize the furniture.

We had a customer who challenged himself to create a brand from scratch and sell furniture on the Internet. His concept was to sell customizable Moroccan sofas. To achieve this, he created a website powered by our visuals, as well as a configurator created by an IT development company, which required a very large number of visuals on a white background. We thus created over a hundred visuals and numerous stagings. And the results are in: sales are starting to take off!

#7 – 3D animation exists, use it to sell furniture online!

Manufacturers of modular furniture sometimes struggle to present their products in such a way that customers immediately understand how they work. But with video, the customer naturally grasps the appeal of the concept. In fact, one study concluded that 96% of buyers appreciate seeing a video explaining an item to ensure their purchase.

Since the creation of a 3D video requires only the same information as the creation of 3D visuals, you can obtain an animated furniture video very quickly. For example, it took us less than a week to build the scene, model the electric bed, prepare the animation and render this 10s video.

The importance of 3D as a marketing tool for selling furniture on the Internet is well established. Marketing furniture requires a strong presence on all platforms, based on photorealistic visuals. To attract a wider customer base, you’ll need to turn to more interactive technologies like 3D configurators and AR, or video animation and 360° viewers.

Would you like to find out more about our 3D creation services, or discuss a project with us? Don’t hesitate to contact us!