Furniture and E-commerce Competition and Cooperation
Author: HKFA.ORG
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Time:2016-12-19
When the traditionally furniture has just attempted to step forward into e-commerce, their competitors from internet has already reach their antennas to Furniture Exhibition, trying to have a new trend of competition and cooperation with the furniture companies.
On the first day of the exhibition, we can see the faces of many vertical e-commerce companies and it is their first time to participate in this exhibition. In these years, most of the booming vertical e-commerce companies have depended on asset and technology to cut into the furniture industry and they lack the background information of this industry. It is these e-commerce furniture companies that are trying to use this exhibition to accelerate their overall strategic layout combining on-line resources integration and off-line physical store joining. They are preparing to find more interested platform agents and more people to join their experience stores.
At the scene of the famous furniture fair, Meilele, Gejiamei and several other vertical e-commerce companies have attracted great attention. This is the first time that these vertical e-commerce companies to participate the physical exhibition. It is said that that they have a definite goal that is to further increase the supplier's team and franchisees'scale. By doing so, they can let their offline physical stores to cover more cities.
If we retrieve the time to four years ago, many big potatoes within this industry will show a disdain look to the e-commerce industry. Although at that time, e-commerce has become more and more important in clothes and electronic products, yet they still believe furniture as for a type of product which has the instincts of high prices, great product differences ,hard to deliver and difficult to assemble it is hard for e-commerce cannot go into this area.
Of course, most of the companies show great interests on using e-commerce to promote their brands and they are willing and eager to try. In fact, in the furniture industry, it does not lack testers (traditional furniture companies) who have been successful at the beginning. However, most of them are at the testing period, it is very hard to compete with the real vertical e-commerce companies. They(traditional furniture companies)met with ups and downs during the whole process and they poured cold waters on many companies who are eager to attempt.
Nevertheless, just accidentally vertical e-commerce companies lacking physical genes began their plan of laying out physical stores after their initial accumulation. They are trying to perfect their O2O business layout. (O2O refers to online to offline, which combines offline business opportunities with the Internet). They began to have face to face competition with the traditional offline furniture companies. Actually, it promotes more and more traditional furniture companies to speed up their pace into e-commerce realm.
Furniture belongs to bulk commodity and experience is very important. Now, the e-commerce companies are trying to recruit physical stores in order to compensate their deficiencies of online experience. According to the description of several furniture e-commerce companies, no less than 50% of the customers buy their products after getting some ideas online and seeing the products offline. This statistic shows the promising future of e-commerce.
Considerable vertical e-commerce companies have adopted the method of using same price online and offline, having offline physical stores as a complement to online stores. Meanwhile, not a few of them have trying to establish their logistics and installment team by getting aid from physical stores. Moreover, there are some furniture e-commerce companies they do not only have their own e-commerce platform but also trying to establish their own payment platform.
Many traditional furniture companies never hide their optimistic view over e-commerce. However, many have to resolve the conflicts of online and offline companies because of that the speed of combination slows. No matter what the future will be, e-commerce must integrate with furniture industry in a large scale and the trend of combine online and offline resources will undoubtedly increases.
Just like what we have seen from the exhibition, e-commerce furniture companies are using their advantages on the internet to integrate with traditional furniture companies over design, manufacture and channel. The same thing has also been done by the traditional furniture companies. This kind of combination will be a great trend within the furniture industry and the almighty competence it creates must play an important role in reshuffling the industry.