Are you moving into a new apartment and want to get rid of your old furniture? Do you want to sell your old furniture to earn some extra cash? Do you wish to get rid of some pieces of furniture that really bogged you down emotionally this whole year during a lockdown? Have you been looking for places to sell your furniture online?
Whatever the reason you want to sell furniture online, we have a simple step-by-step process for you. In this post, you will learn how to sell furniture online in a way that gives you complete control over your sale.
If you just want to get rid of some old piece to upgrade to the latest design, you could actually just take it to the nearest consignment shop. But the method to sell your old furniture that we will teach in this guide is far easier than that. You do not need to carry your piece of furniture to any shop to make some cash out of it. We will discuss selling your furniture online, and at a better price than what you would get if you sell it to a retail or consignment shop.
You can use certain tricks to get the price for the old furniture that you want. These tricks are not about bluffing the quality or condition of the piece but are smart ways to influence customers to buy it for a price that is really worth it.
6 Steps to Sell Furniture Online
Here are the 6 steps you need to take to successfully sell your old furniture over the internet.
1. Build an Ecommerce Website
This might come across as a shock to you or as an overwhelming statement, to the least. That’s because you might think you would have to spend a lot of time and money to hire a web developer to get a website built. But that’s not true.
With the help of several website builders available in the market, you can create your website all by yourself in just a couple of hours without having to write any code at all. The simplest way to sell furniture online is to sign up for a free account on Strikingly. Once you register, you can access your dashboard and be taken to our template selection page.
Image taken from Strikingly
We have a lot of website templates that you can choose from. The template will serve as a ready-to-use web design for your site. That’s how to save the time and cost of getting your website designed from scratch.
Image taken from Strikingly
After adding some basic information about why you are making this website to sell your old furniture, you can add a simple store section to upload your furniture pictures. From your Strikingly editor, click ‘Add New Section’ and select ‘Simple Store’.
2. Prepare Pictures of the Furniture Items That You Want to Sell
In the simple store section, you can add details of the furniture items you want to sell. You will need your product photos and pictures of the furniture items you want to put up for sale. Make sure you have proper lighting in the room where you take the photographs. Your items must look good in the pictures to attract customers and effectively sell furniture online. It is therefore preferable that you clean up the items before taking photoshoots. Show the items from multiple angles to give the audience a better view of how they look.
3. Create Product Pages
To upload these pictures, you need to build product pages. Click ‘Add New Product,’ and a product page layout will appear. Upload the product shots and set their price. Write a catchy product description to entice customers to purchase it. Repeat the process for each item that you want to sell.
Image taken from Strikingly
The prices that you set for your items must be competitive. Look into the pricing strategies of others who sell furniture online. Even though you want to sell your old furniture, you can set its price close to its new piece if it looks and feels as good as new. This is the benefit of selling your furniture online.
In the product description, be as descriptive as possible for each item. The more you tell about your item’s features and how it makes you feel when you use it, the more customers will imagine buying and using it. This will significantly increase your chances of making a sale.
4. Select Suitable Payment Gateways
You need to connect your website to payment methods so that your customers can make purchases directly from the site. Once the transaction is made, the order will be placed for you to deliver. Strikingly offers multiple payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and direct payment via customer’s debit or credit card.
Image taken from Strikingly
Once someone places an order for a furniture item, you can trace the details in our order management system built in the Strikingly editor. When you sell furniture online, you’ll need to deliver each item sold to the customer. If you are selling digital products, you do not need to deliver or ship them when they are sold.
5. Improve the Website’s SEO
You might need to take some minor steps to enhance the search engine optimization of your site. This is because your website needs to appear in the search results when someone is looking to buy furniture online. The digital market is a very competitive place, and many people must be looking to sell furniture online.
Make sure you add an appropriate site description and use the relevant keywords in your product descriptions. Add appropriate call to action buttons to make the buying process smooth for customers. The checkout process must be particularly smooth to avoid customers backing off from the purchase last minute. You wouldn’t want a high bounce rate on your site when trying to sell your old furniture.
Image taken from Strikingly
Another way to enhance your website’s search rankings is by integrating it with your social media profiles or pages. You can upload photos of the furniture items you are selling on your Facebook and Instagram profiles. Then add part of your Facebook or Instagram feed to your website using our social feed feature. Linking your website with social media would help you drive traffic back and forth among all platforms and speed up the process of selling your furniture online.
6. Promote Your Website
The last step is to continuously promote your website to effectively sell furniture online. Tell your friends and peers about it, and keep sharing the pictures on your social media profiles. Use other forms of organic marketing to get traffic to your site so that you can quickly sell your old furniture and replace it with new ones.
Many Strikingly users are running successful online stores or eCommerce websites, some of which were started to sell old items but ended up turning into full-fledged businesses. You might want to do the same when you see how easy it is to sell furniture online through our platform. Maybe after you can sell all your old furniture items, you want to consider buying and selling new furniture as well. Your website will be all set, and you will already know how to sell furniture online.
Our goal at Strikingly is to make it easier and resourceful for our users to build and run online shopping websites. You can sell any kind of product or service through our platform. The best part of it all is that you control the whole process. If you need to make any changes to your web pages, you do not have to wait for a programmer or web developer to do that. You can simply log into your Strikingly editor and edit whatever you want to change all by yourself.
If you opt for other places to sell your furniture online, you would not fully control the process. On some eCommerce platforms, you have to wait until your product gets approved before you can start selling it. These platforms also take a cut from your sale. But when you sell furniture online through a website built on Strikingly, you get to keep a larger portion of your sales transactions and enjoy full control over your site’s appearance and maintenance. Our VIP users enjoy zero transaction fees on the sales made through their website built on Strikingly.
But giving you full control over your site does not mean we are not available to support you if you face any issues. Our customer support team is available 24/7 via live chat to tackle any technical errors you might encounter. You can also contact us if you are having problems getting familiar with our tools and features. We keep updating our features from time to time and are happy to provide tutorials on using every new tool that we introduce. We assure you a smooth experience of building and running a successful eCommerce site to sell furniture online.
