Making a Bid for Good Deals on Furniture
With sales figures growing daily on Web sites like EBay and Yahoo Auctions, e-retailers are trying to take a chip off the auction block. The latest effort is a joint venture between online furniture retailer FurniturePoint.com and online auction venue Auction-Addict.com to create a central online outlet showroom where Web surfers can bid on home furnishings 24 hours a day.
The showroom, accessed from either https://www.furniturepoint.com or https://www.auctionaddict.com, is filled with sofas, entertainment centers, bookcases, upholstery, lamps, wall art and more from FurniturePoint.com’s excess inventory and customer returns. Merchandise is organized into subcategories such as hall-entry, kitchen, bedroom or family room.
“We have a 100% customer satisfaction policy on our retail site. If a customer returns a sofa, chances are someone else won’t want it. Rather than having that sofa sit in our warehouse forever, the auction site allows us to resell it,” explains Michael R. West, president and chief executive of FurniturePoint.com. The company also works with its manufacturers to post items from discontinued furniture lines.
New offers are posted daily, bids are taken online and purchases are made through winning bids. But the best part of this shopping experience is that unlike a real store, this virtual furniture showroom lets customers bargain for items. So, if you don’t think that 27-by-30-inch oil reproduction of “Two Himalayan Rabbits” is worth $267.50, maybe no one else will either, and you’ll get it for $167.50!
