Structural changes cannot occur overnight in large markets. The signals are gradually becoming apparent, other markets are undergoing similar transformations and classic cost and development structures have to adapt: the internet has arrived. Furniture manufacturers no longer compete regionally, supra-regionally and nationwide, but directly worldwide with wages, laws, offers and intensive marketing.
Anyone in the furniture trade today who only has a business card, a website and a shop will not be able to survive in the long term. Furniture retailers cannot ignore the zeitgeist, and if they do, they are simply overlooked in the flood of World Wide Advertising. The increasing virtual decision support, the open comparison and the inferior goods that are always within reach, online building instructions on YouTube or reports described in forums encourage the customer to do what seems economical for the customer: to save.
The Institute for Retail Research (IFH) sees the furniture market on a growth course in the coming years. In recent years, total sales of furniture and furnishings in Germany have risen to just under 33 billion, with a full 9% being achieved commercially and 91% in private consumption. The increase in turnover of over 4% is similar to the average turnover of the entire retail trade. In Switzerland and Austria, turnover is reported at 11.5 billion each.
Forecast turnover development in the furniture industry in Germany from 2010 to 2022 (in billions of euros)
The following should be noted with regard to these figures: Of the total turnover, almost 10% is achieved through online and mail-order sales, and the trend is rising rapidly. Buyers are specifically looking for details: they ask about the furniture designer, find out about materials, how and where the product was made. Buyers are once again more concerned with the philosophy of the collection on display, the innovative force behind it. Anyone who buys an online shop system for less than two hundred euros is putting together as many attributes and purchase terms as possible, and incidentally selling furniture and decorative items at dumping prices on the internet.
The internet gives the impression that everything is free. The internet itself is free, users usually only pay the monthly basic fee to the provider. There is everything on the internet: films, music, books, love and offers. The content is searched for, compared and used to help make decisions. Homo economicus, the time-consistent expected-benefit maximiser from business management textbooks, checks his computer or mobile phone and makes purchase decisions between brushing his teeth and Netflix.
The millennials have already completely taken over these structures, as no restaurant reservations, no holiday bookings or jeans purchases are made without a mobile phone. What the supposed know-it-all Google or to some extent Bing indicates is briefly considered, compared and bought on the move. Some still go to furniture stores, choose a piece of furniture, sit on it and order it from otto.de, XXXLutz or IKEA. The very brave click on the furniture offer at allibaba.com, the largest Asian online trading marketplace, DHL will already deliver it. This behaviour is gradually being adopted by all age groups and search engines are climbing to the top of the offer. It is now irrelevant whether the supplier is called amazon.de or zalando.de, the search engines simply show the lowest price in the first row of search results and the lamp is bought with one click. Goods-seeking companies choose this purchasing model as well, because this is where the people work who also privately purchase goods and services around the clock. Cult, fashions, trends and megatrends are explored and saved or ignored via Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook as well as Twitter.
The megatrend, i.e. the long-lasting interest focus of individualisation, has been around for 20 years. However, megatrends could soon just be called trends, because the internet has a feature that no marketplace in history has had before: it is the fastest marketplace in the world. Today upholstered beds and shower cubicles as a trend, tomorrow box-spring beds and floor-level showers.Manufacturers find that their design is offered as a copy at low prices on ebay.de. Kitchen manufacturers, furniture stores or carpet manufacturers realise that these furniture concepts have outlived their usefulness. Craftsmen are less likely to get the job of assembling sometimes complex furniture because instructions are freely available online several times, as text, pictures or even video. If something goes wrong during assembly, the manufacturer is berated. Marketing in the industry is confused, very extensive and cost-intensive due to constant changes, or as one seasoned marketing specialist said: after years in marketing, I would suddenly have to study computer science to keep up. KPMG was able to present some interesting figures in 2018 in the study "Set up for the future". To get inspiration in the Home & Interior sector, 73 percent of the study participants browse online shops of furniture retailers, and 32 percent browse social networks. 30 percent find the targeted search for a product from the Home & Interior segment frustrating, both online and offline. Every third study participant therefore expects an online availability check for stationary shops in the furniture trade. Three out of four consumers (76 percent) would prefer an online shop with a stationary showroom to an exclusively internet presence. 39 percent of the study participants state that they have done research in advance on Google or Amazon (35 percent). A remarkable 37 per cent of respondents have researched online in advance with the retailer from whom they ultimately bought locally.What are SEO, keywords, bench marks, impressions, CPC; why is the text shown as duplicate content, how am I supposed to create a catalogue, why don't we appear in the search engine when we type in the word bedroom wardrobe ?
On the one hand, the search engine giant Google does not want to be influenced. To exert influence, you can buy this influence: you book advertising per click directly with the search engine in Google Ads. However, so many providers act and these are also seen, provided they pay at least 4-digit sums - monthly. The fact is that furniture customers are online. More than half will statistically search for the home idea or home inspiration directly.
Changes in turnover furniture market 2011 to 2023
Every fourth customer buys online after having exhausted the desire for information. A high percentage of the online customers in the furniture industry have purchasing power with an income of over 3,000 euros, and buying furniture online is very attractive to customers because it is less effort, convenient to select from home, available around the clock, a better overview of the range and free delivery with little effort. The e-commerce share of the market is steadily increasing.there are labour laws, opening hours, storage costs, to name just a few principles of the current slowdown. Some retailers offer so-called private shopping. Customers are accommodated, from Monday to Saturday around the clock. Any desired appointment with an expert adviser is fulfilled: simply call, order an adviser and the customer can drop in after hours. This example shows that the challenge of the digital transformation has been accepted and that customers are being approached. It remains to be seen whether such concepts are viable and can provide customers with current design, material and social trends for the furnishing industry in the same way as the web.
What can furniture retailers and marketplaces do? Improve own product data with Onedot to achieve optimised time-to-market. Accurate master data and a shortened product roadmap stabilise market presence, increase findability on the internet and ultimately lead to more sales.
