Regular readers of this space know that I often receive phone calls and e-mails from consumers who search Google to resolve a problem with their local furniture store, find one of our stories at the top of the page and end up calling or e-mailing thinking they’ve reached the store.
The most recent time this happened had an unusual twist.
I received a call from a woman seeking a fabric swatch to determine if the sofa color she saw online would look the same in person. As with so many of these calls, I tried to determine how she arrived on my phone and to see if I could at least get her to the right place.
I explained how people searching Google often end up on our site and offered a suggestion on how she might refine her search to find her preferred store.
That’s where things got interesting.
As it turns out, she hadn’t searched Google. She was shopping on Amazon for a Stone & Beam sofa and was given our number by a live chat person on Amazon’s website. You read that right, by a live chat person on Amazon’s website. I asked twice to make sure I understood correctly.
I’m not sure how that occurred, and I admit I haven’t tried to get a live Amazon chat person on the line to duplicate that result. But if you’re with Amazon and are reading this, you might want to look into it. Certainly that’s not the result Amazon is looking for.
And while I don’t know whether or not Amazon is set up to send out swatches, many local furniture stores and many furniture manufacturers are. So naturally I asked if she had tried shopping her local furniture store.
As it turns out she had. That was her first choice.
However, her local store gave her a delivery time of 16 to 20 weeks (that’s four to five months in consumer parlance). Amazon’s website told her she could get her preferred sofa in her preferred color in seven days. At a time when so many stores are struggling to get goods, that’s a very scary thing.
That Amazon’s scale, buying power and logistical leverage is allowing it to get goods when so many others are facing long lead times and painful manufacturer backlogs does not bode well for the smaller players looking to hold onto customers. That this comes at a time of unprecedented demand and at a time when so many first time householders are entering the market has significant implications, not just for sales today, but also for potential future purchases as well.
I don’t know what the solution for furniture stores might be. Certainly if there are goods available on shorter lead times, I’d be calling those out in every available form of communication and featuring those goods on my website and in-store. Or you could hope that Amazon keeps sending its customers to Furniture Today.
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March 15, 2021 at 05:01PM
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Blog: A call about Amazon that's scary for furniture stores … and a little scary for Amazon - Furniture Today
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