20 eCommerce Challenges Faced by Home Décor, Furniture, and Improvement Businesses

This blog was first published on ERPSB

Summary: Home décor, furniture, and improvement businesses face significant challenges in eCommerce adoption despite recognizing its potential. This blog explores 20 key challenges grouped into four categories: product visualization, sales growth, customer engagement, and operational efficiency. Challenges include managing diverse inventories, showcasing lifestyles, providing detailed product information, and addressing customer uncertainties. Effective solutions involve leveraging technology to enhance visualization, streamline operations, and build trust.

Introduction

While most Home Décor, Furniture, and Improvement businesses are convinced about the role and importance of eCommerce in their industry, they don’t move forward with eCommerce adoption with the same conviction. Reason, the challenges that lie ahead of them.

While the potential in eCommerce is immense, navigating the path demands a keen understanding of the unique challenges that lie ahead. In this comprehensive blog we will explore 20 eCommerce challenges faced by Home Décor, Furniture, and Improvement businesses as they navigate the path of eCommerce adoption.

Addressing these challenges by leveraging technology unlocks immense opportunities, ensuring businesses not only meet but exceed the expectations of their customers.

For better understanding, we have clubbed these challenges into four major categories:

• Elevating Product Visualization Online
• Driving Sales and Business Growth
• Driving Customer Engagement and Loyalty
• Running an Efficient Operations

1. Elevating Product Visualization Online

When venturing into eCommerce, the foremost challenge for home décor and furniture businesses in the eCommerce realm revolves around product visualization.

• Challenge 1: Managing Diverse Product Inventories – Home improvement businesses typically maintain extensive and diverse product variations. Effectively managing and showcasing this diversity online without overwhelming customers is a huge challenge. Failure to address this challenge can lead to a cumbersome and confusing online shopping experience for customers, potentially resulting in decision fatigue and a higher likelihood of abandoned carts.
• Challenge 2: Showcasing the Lifestyle Online – Businesses in Home Décor and Furniture industry struggle to convey the lifestyle associated with their products online. The challenge lies in connecting with customers on a visceral level, conveying the experience associated with each product. Failure to overcome this hurdle risks creating a disconnect, leaving customers indifferent to the brand narrative.
• Challenge 3: Detailed Product Information – Providing comprehensive product information (in multiple formats – text, images, videos, etc.) poses a critical challenge. The impact is felt in customer decision-making, where inadequate details lead to uncertainty. The absence of detailed information hinders customers from making informed choices, resulting in decreased confidence and reluctance to commit to a purchase. For certain businesses, this translates into the need for implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system.
• Challenge 4: Alleviating uncertainty – Uncertainty looms large in the minds of customers when contemplating online purchases. Home improvement products often boast intricate details and diverse features that can be challenging to convey online. From the texture of materials to the spatial requirements of furniture, the challenge lies in enabling customers to visualize these complex products accurately. The failure to address this uncertainty leaves customers hesitant, creating a barrier to conversion.

2. Drive Sales and Business Growth:

Having navigated product visualization, the next set of challenges revolves around attracting customers, driving sales, and fostering growth:

• Challenge 5: Cost-Effective Customer Acquisition – The challenge lies in the cost-effective acquisition of customers across channels. Home décor and furniture businesses struggle to use product information to drive organic traffic, leverage educational content (for DIY users) to drive engagement, leverage social media to drive product discovery and sales, and more. Failure to overcome this hurdle results in a limited audience reach or acquiring customers at a loss. Ineffectively reaching prospective customers constrains growth potential and places the business at a disadvantage in the competitive landscape.
• Challenge 6: Intuitive Shopping Experience – Creating an intuitive shopping experience, from effortless product discovery and supporting product customizations to effortless checkout, is a formidable challenge. The impact manifests in reduced conversions and lost sales opportunities. A convoluted shopping journey hampers customer engagement, leading to frustration and eventual abandonment of the purchase process.
• Challenge 7: Personalized Recommendations – The challenge of providing personalized product recommendations directly impacts customer retention and lifetime value. Without personalized suggestions, businesses fail to capitalize on upselling and cross-selling opportunities, limiting revenue potential and hindering customer loyalty.
• Challenge 8: Building Trust Online – Trust is paramount, especially when it comes to significant home improvement purchases. Establishing credibility and building trust online poses a challenge as customers seek assurance regarding product quality, authenticity, and the reliability of the services offered. The impact of not effectively addressing this challenge is substantial. In the absence of a robust foundation of trust, customers may hesitate to make substantial investments, leading to a direct impact on conversion rates, overall sales, brand reputation, and customer relationship.
• Challenge 9: Payment and Security Concerns – In eCommerce, providing payment and financing options while ensuring security and data protection is a constant challenge. Neglecting it can erode trust, increase cart abandonment, and limit accessibility for high-value purchases. Addressing this challenge is not just a requirement but crucial for fostering a secure, trustworthy online shopping environment, encouraging customer loyalty.
• Challenge 10: Addressing Installation and After-Sales Concerns – Unlike standard eCommerce products, home improvement items often require installation or may come with after-sales service considerations. Communicating these aspects effectively online and addressing potential customer concerns regarding installation and support becomes a critical challenge. Failure to provide clear and comprehensive information on installation processes and post-purchase support may lead to heightened customer concerns and hesitations. This, in turn, can result in increased product returns, dissatisfied customers, and negative reviews, significantly impacting the overall brand reputation.

3. Drive Customer Engagement and Loyalty

Moving beyond transactions, the challenges extend into creating a lasting impression and fostering customer loyalty:

• Challenge 11: Leveraging User-Generated Content – Failure to leverage user-generated content, such as product images in customer environment, reviews, and ratings, hinders the establishment of trust. The impact is a lack of credibility, or social proof, leading to reduced customer engagement and a diminished sense of community around the brand.
• Challenge 12: Adapting to Changing Trends – The challenge lies in the ability to adapt swiftly to changing customer demands and industry trends. Take, for instance, the growing emphasis on sustainable products. Possessing the right products becomes futile if there’s an inability to effectively communicate this to the audience. The impact is evident in the loss of relevance, as businesses struggle to meet evolving expectations. Failure to adapt leaves businesses trailing behind competitors and alienates the brand from a dynamic market.
• Challenge 13: Fostering Loyalty with Exceptional Service – Building loyalty through seamless and consistent shopping experience and exceptional service (pre and post sales) across channel proves challenging. The impact is felt in diminished customer retention and brand loyalty. Businesses failing to provide unmatched service experiences risk losing customers to competitors who prioritize post-purchase engagement and satisfaction.

4. Run an Efficient Operations

An efficient business operation is essential for running a sustainable business. However, with multiple systems and teams, running a coordinated system is easier said than done. The underlying challenges include:

• Challenge 14: Streamlining Product and Inventory Management – Inefficient product and inventory management directly impact supply chain efficacy. The challenge manifests in the form of stockouts or overstocking, leading to financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and operational inefficiencies. The problem is even bigger for home décor, furniture, and improvement businesses given the size and nature of their products.
• Challenge 15: Leveraging Physical Store Investments – For retailers with physical locations, leveraging existing physical store investments within the eCommerce landscape is a complex challenge. Neglecting this integration can result in underutilized assets, reduced brand visibility, poor operational efficiency, and a disjointed customer experience. The impact extends to missed revenue opportunities and potential customer disengagement.
• Challenge 16: Automating Order Fulfillment – The challenge of automating order fulfillment directly influences customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Inadequate automation results in delayed deliveries, order processing errors, order aging, and heightened operational costs, impacting the overall customer experience. Inventory management and order fulfilment can be difficult problems to solve, give that most businesses have multiple systems to manage and take care of them.
• Challenge 17: Providing an Omni-Channel Experience – With multi-channels sales being the trend, failure to provide a seamless omni-channel experience across all channels affects brand reliability. The impact is felt in disjointed customer journeys, leading to confusion and dissatisfaction. Inconsistencies across channels diminish brand trust and result in missed opportunities for customer engagement.
• Challenge 18: Finding Efficiency Every Step of the Way – Inefficiencies in the shipping process impact the entire customer journey. The challenge is reflected in increased costs, delayed deliveries, and heightened environmental impact. Businesses failing to optimize shipping options risk compromising operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
• Challenge 19: Managing Returns Effectively – Handling product returns is a nuanced challenge for eCommerce in the home improvement sector. Failing to address it adequately can result in customer dissatisfaction, tarnished reputation, and increased operational costs. An efficient returns process is not just about processing refunds but a strategic opportunity to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall brand perception.
• Challenge 20: Meeting Diverse Customer Demands – Addressing the needs of both B2B and B2C customers poses a significant challenge. Failure to cater to diverse customer demands results in missed revenue opportunities and a fragmented customer experience. And, managing two different stores for B2B and B2C customers is a huge operational and cost overhead for any business.

In the pursuit of eCommerce excellence, Home Décor, Furniture, and Improvement businesses confront multifaceted challenges. Understanding these hurdles is the first step toward overcoming them strategically. This guide serves as a compass, shedding light on the formidable obstacles that pepper the path to digital success. As businesses navigate these challenges, the promise of thriving in the competitive eCommerce landscape awaits.

Need help to navigate these challenges? i95Dev is here to help. We have worked extensively with businesses in this industry helping them address these challenges and more. Checkout our eCommerce solution offering for the Home Décor, Furniture, Construction and Improvement industry for more details.