You CAN’T discount Amazon! If they are stepping up their game in the home furnishings business, then all furniture retailers have to plan their strategies well. When Amazon sets its mind to an area they drive a hard competitive game.

Furniture retailers need to drive their omnichannel strategies more aggressively. Where Amazon is still weak is in their physical in-store capabilities. They don’t have the footprint and presence that many other furniture retailers have, so furniture retailers have to make sure they get their in-store pickup to click. Then they must make sure to emphasize the “come in to see it, touch it, feel it — before you pick it up” element.

Key message: Get your Buy Online or Reserve Online working well. Then ADVERTISE it on your website. It can’t be an option that customers discover in the last phase of putting in their online order.

Key strategy: Compete where Amazon cannot — in the omnichannel domain.

More and more of the furniture category will shift to online sales. It’s simply more convenient. Wayfair has been very successful the past few years. However, Amazon is in a good position to absorb a lot of those sales, especially since they also offer assembly services.

There are big challenges in the furniture market for Amazon or any other online retailer because the cost of returns, meeting shipping expectation and the pick and pack are quite high. Given that Amazon needs to find a way to show profit in retail-like sales, furniture seems an unlikely candidate.

I’m told by furniture sellers that there is a particular returns problem. That the minute furniture leaves your warehouse, the value has dropped 10 to 20 percent because it doesn’t get returned in sellable form. That adds incredible cost to any return.

Of course, this is Amazon. Either they sort out a way to solve that or it is another mis-direction designed to keep retailers on their heels.

Still, register me as “doubtful.”

Where online furniture sellers can disrupt traditional retail, Amazon has the capacity to disintermediate. Amazon Prime Air and leased ships can bring goods directly from Asian factories to consumers, disintermediating even distributors in the supply chain.

There is a significant problem with large furniture … once the online shipper drops it in your driveway, how do you get it into your house by yourself? Low-/no-cost home delivery and setup can be a huge differentiator for local retailers.

Furniture is a considered purchase, typically at significant price points. It is still a category where customers want to touch, feel, sit and lay on it in a store. The question of how much share will be lost to Amazon depends upon whether stores will step up to differentiate value based on customer experience, professional staff and service levels.

There will be more online furniture shopping in the years to come as more of us begin to rely on e-commerce. The busier we are the more we will be relying on online shopping, even for those larger ticket items. I have friends that swear by Wayfair, both in quality and cost. I have never thought of myself as a big-ticket buyer online. Yet I tend to use the internet to find the best bargain before going out and doing the actual legwork. I still have to “kick the tires” as the expression goes. The next step is finding the confidence to put my toes in the water and make that first larger purchase.

Most certainly! We should never underestimate the power of Amazon. Furniture is yet another frontier that Amazon may conquer with their relentless innovation and reach. However, unlike home goods, electronics or perhaps basic clothing, furniture shopping is a multi-sensory experience where the customer wants to touch, feel and see how the furniture will fit into their lives.

The mobile and desktop experience could be a good starting point. Especially when you integrate virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities, which enable the consumer to strategically place the furniture in their homes and determine the right dimensions, all conveniently from their smartphone.

This may also be another targeted category for Amazon to open furniture showrooms in strategic markets such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc., as that would resonate well with consumers.

Wayfair, according to the Motley Fool, is chronically unprofitable. Gross margins are low, typically around 24 percent, far below its peers. Williams-Sonoma enjoys gross margins in the high 30s. And privately held IKEA generated a gross margin of 42.9 percent last year.

It’s a category I don’t know how is supposed to deal with returns which historically are high for online. Couple that with abusers who could simply buy it all and return within a few weeks and I don’t share the “gee-wow” of this announcement. But you probably knew that.

Let’s unbundle the question a bit. Will Amazon disrupt a segment of the furniture business? Yes. Will the size of that segment grow over time? Of course, the online share of every category will grow overtime. Could Amazon become a major force in furniture? I suppose so, if they choose to. So what’s to stop them? Well, it’s easier to ship a book than it is to truck around a fully assembled bookcase. You can leave a package with a CD by the door, but what do you do about a couch? How happy will third-party carriers be with hauling around large freight? And what about those nice bells and whistles like assembly, placement and — takeaway of old furniture such as bedding or appliances? So the answer is yes, they could take a bigger piece of the furniture market if they wanted. But the better question is, do they really want it?

They can disrupt once again for smaller, easily managed items, but not for large purchases. The risk of problems with quality, satisfaction, preference is too great for returns for larger purchases for Amazon to gain major marketshare. Plus, who handles large items when they drop ship them to your doorstep?

Wayfair has also struggled financially with the large item return policies (which have a higher return percentage than traditional retail items). For accessories, lighting, etc. YES!

The difference between Amazon and everyone else is that Amazon doesn’t start with the product. They start with the customer. They connect and understand the customer and how they behave and build the engagement around that. When you get down to it, Amazon really doesn’t sell products. They fit products into their connection and infrastructure. If they deem furniture fits, they will win, just like they do on everything else.

Others who focus on the product (furniture) first will always come in second to Amazon.

I commented a couple of weeks ago that Amazon had not yet made big inroads into the major appliance market — but obviously they are headed in this direction, along with furniture. To some degree IKEA has already figured out how to generate furniture sales not tied to its showrooms, so it’s clearly an opportunity for Amazon too. No doubt that they will figure out the logistics of bulky products but this still seems like a business where customers want to “kick the tires” — so perhaps Amazon ought to test showrooms in their early test markets.

IKEA disrupted the furniture business and is very popular with Millennials. A recent article said that Millennials are beginning to purchase homes. If that is accurate, then the furniture marks stands to expand. However, it will expand as business as usual. Millennials have different tastes than their parents. Amazon may well be able to take advantage of that.

From electronics and kitchen gadgets to food and HBA, Amazon has significantly disrupted the marketplace in markets where many brick-and-mortar retailers are shuttering their doors. My concern with furniture is the delivery and setup inside the home and with removal of the old stuff, which is why I like buying local. Who are they going to hire to bring the furniture into the home and make the customer happy? If the furniture is dropped off in the driveway without the white glove service and it is pouring rain, who is responsible for selling a sponge that used to be a couch? U.S. Appliance sells everything. You must pay extra to have them bring it into the home and you must hire your own service person to install it. Amazon wants to own everything that is a consumable good, and if they figure out how to do it right they will be successful. Our downtowns are becoming ghost towns, and if this furniture business grows online it will continue to decimate the local furniture stores that… Read more »

Amazon must always be considered a threat, but this category will be a challenge for them, without question. I used to work with hundreds of furniture retailers in my days at GERS, and one thing they all told me, time and time again, is that furniture buying is an emotional process. While Amazon is perhaps the best on the planet at removing emotion from the retail transaction, and they will surely grab some share of the market, I am not sure their model translates at scale to motivate purchases that people expect to last for a decade.

With new competitors entering the fray of the furniture market — like Amazon and Alibaba — with an online approach, and several start-up companies, the competition is heating up. We will likely see some bankruptcies and/or consolidation shaking this industry in the next few years. While the online giants will take a chunk of the market share, the brick-and-mortar players that succeed are the ones that personalize and differentiate the shopping experience. Furniture purchases are often omni-channel shopping journeys with a combination of showrooming, webrooming and catalogrooming impacting the final purchase decision. Savvy retailers are focused on optimizing the cross-channel experience and capitalizing on the benefits of the physical store experience that can’t be replicated online. Just look at what RH Gallery has done. Building showrooms in major metro areas by leveraging fabulous real estate with truly amazing catalogs they have clearly differentiated themselves from the pack. Low end good looking furniture may be susceptible to disintermediation but touch, feel and smell is a must for higher end product. The end result may be an… Read more »