Introduction
While selling furniture on the Internet can be lucrative, it involves many logistical challenges, like competition from many other dealers and pricey shipping.
Dropshipping furniture can help you address the challenges of e-commerce, removing the need to invest in inventory upfront while making it possible to completely outsource product development and order fulfillment. This frees you up to focus on business and marketing strategy and find ways to differentiate your brand from the competition.
Dropshipping is an excellent way to earn money, and the furniture industry is a great place to start. You can find suppliers all over the world, including those in your own country. It’s important to choose a good supplier and avoid scams.
What Is Dropshipping & How Does it Work?
Dropshipping is a business model in which an online store sells products without having to stock, warehouse or ship the items itself. When a customer places an order, the dropshipping company has the inventory and picks, packs, and ships it directly to the customer on behalf of the merchant.
Furniture dropshipping can include a variety of products for personal and business use. These include full-sized bedroom furniture sets, small items like plant stands or lamps, and other household furniture.
It’s one of the most popular ecommerce business models because it allows companies to scale their sales while keeping costs low.
Here are some tips for finding dropshipping furniture suppliers:
How to Find the Right Supplier
You can find a furniture supplier that meets your needs by following these steps:
- Be clear about what type of furniture you want to sell.
- Consider the quality of the furniture and its price point.
- Choose a company that provides good customer service and has a good reputation in the industry.
- Find out how easy it will be to work with this company, online or in person, when it comes time for ordering furniture or getting customer feedback on your products after they’re shipped out to customers (if applicable).
- Determine whether you’ll need access to a warehouse or fulfillment center (or both), as well as any additional costs associated with them before making your final decision
Healthy and consistent demand for furniture
The furniture market is a great opportunity for you if you want to sell furniture online.
The US alone has an annual home goods market worth more than $65 billion, and is projected to grow 10.3% in the next five years.
Other estimates predict the global furniture market to hit $718.3 billion by 2025. And when the economy shrank by about 3.5% in 2020, the furniture market actually grew by 0.6%.
Furniture made up over 17% of total ecommerce sales in 2021.
Source:https://www.statista.com/outlook/255/109/furniture-homeware/united-states
The online furniture market has been growing recently. One reason for the growth is that pandemic lockdowns have forced more people to spend more time at home, creating home offices as well as upgrading their existing living spaces. Another reason is that businesses are reopening, and once they do, office and commercial furniture sales will likely have their time to shine, too.
Online furniture market is competitive
The furniture market is competitive: some estimates say that there are more than 3,000 online furniture retailers and millions of Google results when you search for “furniture.” When dropshipping furniture, you’ll have to compete with not only the other dropshippers out there but also established furniture brands like IKEA and Wayfair as well as third-party marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy.
Dropshippng offers flexibility
The furniture market is huge, so you can take this niche in just about any direction you want. Flexibility is key when it comes to dropshipping businesses, especially if you want to be able to quickly pivot to capitalize on emerging trends. You might choose to do home versus office furniture, focus on corporate customers or the general public, sell outdoor furniture or drill down into a super-specific niche.
Furniture related online searches are transactional
Furniture shoppers are increasingly buying large items online. And furniture-related searches are more transactional than most. About 36% of furniture searches receive informational content, while 62% of searches end up being transactional. This means SEO should be a key component to your dropshipping furniture marketing strategy.
Free Shipping Dropshippers
Small and heavy furniture items can be expensive and risky to ship. Carriers charge higher rates for bulky, overweight packages. Plus, you risk damage en route. Damaged products create not only unhappy customers but also lost revenue to refunds.
Gross profit margin
The average gross profit margin for furniture is on average 31%, so you won’t need to make as many sales to be successful. Since furniture boosts AOV and profit margins, you won’t need to worry about constantly driving more traffic and leads. Fewer orders means your team has less related support tasks.
Why Use Dropshipping for Furniture?
Dropshipping is a great way to test the market and get started in business. It allows you to get your products into the hands of customers without having to pay for inventory upfront or invest in expensive marketing campaigns. You can find out which products will sell well, how much profit margin there is in selling them, and what people are willing to pay for them before investing in any capital-intensive steps like having inventory shipped directly from a manufacturer or distributor.
When you’re ready to scale up your dropshipping operation and start making more money, it’s easy to transition from dropshipping furniture suppliers that provide only low-cost items (like accessories) into higher-ticket furniture suppliers who offer custom designs and more advanced features like built-in beds or built-in storage cabinets.
The Benefits of Dropshipping Furniture
In other words, you don’t need to be a furniture manufacturer in order to sell furniture. You can simply take advantage of the fact that most people prefer to buy from private individuals rather than large companies and make yourself into one of those private individuals.
It’s easy to see how this can be beneficial for many different types of business owners:
- Owners who want to sell high-quality furniture but don’t know how (or don’t have time) to manufacture it themselves
- Owners who want an additional revenue stream without having to invest in their own inventory or hire employees
- Owners who want an alternative sales channel
Top Tips for Choosing the Perfect Supplier
Choosing the right furniture dropshipping supplier is critical to the success of your business. You want someone who will provide you with high-quality furniture and help you grow your business.
Here are some tips for finding a great supplier:
- Check reviews before ordering from a site. There are many forums where people share their experiences with suppliers, including Facebook groups, Reddit threads and blogs. It’s important to read through these reviews so you know what others have said about their experiences shopping on that site or working with a particular company. If there are no reviews available for a site, it may be best to choose another one until more feedback has been generated from customers.
- Check out the website of each prospective supplier and see if they have an About page that includes information about their staff members or bios describing why they’re passionate about what they do.
- Look at how often they post on social media sites such as Twitter or Instagram (and make sure there aren’t any offensive posts). This can help give insight into how involved they are in their community.
- Ask yourself whether this vendor would be able to handle large volume orders—you’d hate to commit countless hours of work only to find out that there’s nowhere else nearby where you could buy similar pieces at lower prices!
- See if payment options include PayPal since that eliminates some risk by guaranteeing funds between buyers’ accounts without having access directly deposited into yours first.
- Check out shipping options including costs as well as estimated delivery times so nothing catches anyone off guard later down line once orders start coming in faster than expected…again
It is not hard to find the right supplier, and this is really a good business model.
Finding the right supplier isn’t difficult, and it’s a great way to start a business. You don’t have to buy a large quantity of furniture when you start out. Instead, order just one or two items at first and see how things go. This way, you can test the quality and customer service of the supplier before committing further. You can also find out more about shipping times and return policies.
It may be tempting to work with multiple suppliers at once in order to get more options available for your dropshipping business model but it can be confusing when trying to manage all of them at once!
Conclusion
A good supplier can help you grow your business, and there are many benefits to using them. You’ll find that they have a wide range of products available at competitive prices, so it’s easy to get started with dropshipping furniture. The best thing is that they will handle all aspects of shipping and delivery while still saving on costs compared with traditional retail models.