Business to Business: Online Furniture Industry

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Business to BusinessOnline Furniture Industry

• By
• Adam Ratana
• In-Soo Son
• Omotola Talabi
• Rubina Zaidi

2
Major Players

• Ccfurn.com
• Full-service office furnishing firm
• Provides wide selection of office furnishings
• Space planning, interior design, and installing
  services
• Gunderchurch.com
• Specializes in church furniture
• Customizes its products
• Markets in mid-west area
• Officefurniture.com
• Supplies office furniture
• Step-by-step project management advice
• Allows you to buy directly from their site

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Major Players

• Office-design.com
• Provides self-planning user interface
• select or create a design
• enter the room shape and measurement
• layout space with products from online catalogs
• view 3D rendering and product review
• Helps customer locate the product dealer nearest
  them
• Mks.net
• Portal site for furniture industry
• Categorizes furniture into specific segments and
  provides industry specialized Webs
• Each web contains the links of manufacturers,
  wholesalers, and retailers

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Common features of the sites

• Sites offer only product information or catalogs
  no selling through sites (except for one)!
• To get further information, must follow up
  through contact
• Company profiles and mission statement
• Online catalog and products list
• Self-design software (office-design.com, mks.net)
• Online ordering form
• Contact information
• List of manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers

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Online gallery of office-design.com
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Screen shop of self-planning software
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Basic concepts

• Informative
• Provide real time detailed product information
  and descriptions for customers.
• Price and feature based comparisons
• Interactive
• Online interactive design and office layout
  software
• Dynamic customizable pages
• Transactional
• Online purchasing
• Order tracking

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Online B2B Furniture Customers

• Customer profiles determined by the core focus
  business strategy of the site.
• Emphasis usually on customer acquisition rather
  than retention because furniture is often a
  one-time expense

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Online B2B Furniture Customers
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Value Added
V A L U E
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How these sites attract customers

• Many of these sites operate by pull systems
• Customers are usually actively searching for
  furniture
• Customers find these sites by doing an online
  search for furniture options thus they visit
  sites that match their search query
• Other methods of attraction
• Being listed on trade site, e.g., www.mks.net
• Word of mouth
• Leasing/purchasing plans
• Free shipping
• Discounted prices

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How these sites retain customers

• Offer increased functionality
• Step-by-step project management help/advice
• Free space planner / tips for preparing a scale
  drawing
• Wide product selection
• Leasing advice / info
• Online lease application / lease payment
  calculator
• On-site assembly option
• Online order tracking system
• Mailing lists to inform customers of sales,
  specials, closeouts, and new product additions
• Functionality to save designs and reload them at
  a later time to continue work on them

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Low Points of Some Sites

• Typically most of these sites are poorly done and
  do not offer much value over a paper catalog
• Confusing Navigation/poor interface design
  (mks.net, ccfurn.com)
• Not enough information or pictures
  (gunderchurch.com)
• Bad use of frames (officefurniture.com)
• Sterile feel not much personality in the
  website (most of the sites)

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High points of some of the Sites

• Excellent use of images and pictures
  (office-design.com, officefurniture.com)
• Able to order online the complete experience
  (officefurniture.com)
• Clean, simple design (gunderchurch.com)
• Friendly feel (officedesign.com)

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Recommendations

• Sites should extend more of their owners presence
  onto the net, offer to form relationships with
  potential businesses buying from them
• In general most of the sites are static sites, or
  use limited database capabilities. They should
  offer more value over a catalog
• Allow businesses to use a wizard to generate a
  list of furniture they might want
• Allow ordering/payment online

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Recommendations

• For the sites that do use ASP or other dynamic
  database technologies, there is no excuse to not
  have more functionality! Sites should
• Allow businesses to check on the status of their
  order (whether it was placed online or not)
• Allow businesses to place orders online
• Enable customizable solutions with pricing and/or
  estimates
• Officefurniture.coms site is very close to
  ideal other sites should model themselves based
  on Officefurniture.coms website