Commerce is changing, and so are the rules that govern how merchants and consumers meet online. Few categories illustrate that better than furniture, where long buying cycles and fragmented experiences are giving way to data-driven speed.
Dan Bennett, CMO of Furniture.com, said the category was unnecessarily painful. “It’s a long-winded process,” he told Karen Webster, PYMNTS CEO, as part of the latest installment of “The SKU” series. “It takes far too much bandwidth than it should. I personally think buying furniture should be kind of a joyous experience. … It has an emotional quotient that I think is forgotten in the process.”
While the Furniture.com domain dates back 1998, Bennett explained that today’s company is a different venture entirely than its early dot-com roots — existing now as a marketplace that standardizes and streamlines the process for the digital age.
Central to that reinvention is data standardization. “Every retailer in furniture has a different way of curating their feed,” he said. To solve that, Furniture.com built in-house artificial intelligence (AI) tools that ingest feeds from 70 retail partners and output a single, normalized dataset.
The payoff is precision. “If I’m searching for a white leather chair, I’ll see white leather chairs even though retailers may call it off-white or vanilla,” Webster observed.
Bennett added that the technology is now evolving for the prompt economy: “A prompt is much longer than a search … we’re building for a prompt-based environment … so we can close that confidence gap.”
Compressing a 15-Hour Journey
Data and AI, Bennett said, are helping collapse what used to be an exhaustive path to purchase. “Most furniture shoppers right now spend north of 15 hours on each search. That’s ridiculous. They cobble together different tools … a Google Sheet … a Pinterest board … screen grabs and texts. In 2025 that’s such a redundant process,” he said.
The new Furniture.com will “galvanize those things into one site experience,” offering a unified interface that lets shoppers visualize an entire room and check out across multiple brands. “For the first time ever … you can buy across Raymour & Flanigan, Bloomingdale’s, Lulu and Georgia, and One Kings Lane, but do it all in one checkout,” he said. For the retailers, the positive ripple effect is that basket sizes and average order volumes increase.
Digital Speed and Showroom Touch
Although Furniture.com is a technology company “in the service of furniture,” Bennett emphasized that “retail is still very important.” About 70 to 80% of large furniture purchases are still made or initiated in-store, and the site tells shoppers when and where items are available locally. “Showrooms are still very important … people still want to sit on or lay on something they’re going to spend decent money on,” he said.
That hybrid approach also helps retailers. “We want to be an accretive experience to retailers rather than dilutive,” Bennett said. “Online shopping for larger pieces may become more prevalent as technology evolves, but we’re very much in lockstep with keeping that balance.”
That focus, he added, extends to trust. “Furniture’s the third most expensive thing anybody buys — a house, a car, and then furniture. So confidence needs to be very high for you to trust that experience and brand.”
Advertising in the Prompt Economy
Bennett said his marketing team is adapting traditional SEO and content strategies “Human interaction with content is going to be very important for how [the site] indexes … we’re active on Reddit,” he told Webster, adding, “We produce 60 to 80 pieces of content a month … and short-form video indexes very well,” he said.
Furniture.com’s roadmap combines consumer upgrades, retailer partnerships, and media efficiency. “We can’t go up against Amazon or Wayfair on budget, but we can go up against them on efficiency and creativity,” he said. The next-generation site debuting in February will be central to that plan.
Looking further ahead, Bennett said winners in the category will pair trust with technology. “It’s about establishing trust quickly … and instilling confidence in the people using your experience. Wherever you can utilize technology and data to build confidence,” he told Webster. “Those are the businesses that will do best.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/