Selling furniture online in India: sizes, delivery and assembly decide the sale

A buyer messages your furniture page: "Will this sofa go through a 3-foot door? Our lift is small. Who fixes the legs?" If the listing had answered, that buyer would have paid instead of asking. To sell furniture online in India, put four things on every product page before they ask. Give exact sizes in centimetres and inches, and the size of the largest piece as delivered. Then say who assembles it and when, and what happens if it arrives damaged. Online furniture is bought on fit and on trust in the delivery. Photographs settle neither.

Sizes are the product description

A listing that says "3-seater sofa, 84 inches" has given one number out of the six a buyer needs. Give width, depth and height for the whole piece, then the numbers that decide comfort: seat height, seat depth and arm height for a sofa.

A bed needs one more number than anything else in the catalogue: the mattress size it takes, measured inside the frame. Indian mattresses come in inch sizes such as 72 x 78, 72 x 75 and 60 x 78. "King" and "queen" mean different sizes to different makers. A buyer keeping the old mattress will read the label on it, not your word for it.

Name the material plainly. "Solid sheesham" and "sheesham veneer on engineered wood" are different products at different prices, and a buyer who learns the difference after delivery says so in the review. Say what the drawers and the back panel are made of, not only the frame.

Will it reach the room?

The costliest return is a piece with nothing wrong with it that would not go into the lift.

Tell buyers the size of the largest piece as it travels, carton or assembled frame, and whether the legs, arms or back come off. Then ask them to measure before paying, with a tape and not by eye. The lift door and the inside of the lift car come first. Then the narrowest door on the way to the room, and the staircase turn if there is no lift. Some apartment associations want the service lift booked and padded for deliveries, so tell buyers to check with theirs.

Assembly and damage: say it before the buyer asks

Assembly has three possible answers, and the listing should give one. It arrives assembled. A carpenter assembles it on a separate visit. Or it is flat-packed, with tools and a video. If a carpenter comes later, say how the visit is booked and whether drilling for a wardrobe or a TV unit is included. A tenant may not be allowed to drill, so say whether the maker advises fixing the piece to the wall.

Damage needs four lines on the page. The buyer checks the piece before signing, and takes photos or a short video if anything is wrong, then messages one named number. Then the page says what happens next: a part replaced, a carpenter visit for a scratch, or a replacement for a cracked frame. How the delivery crew handles the doorstep itself is in our photo-proof process for furniture damage.

A fit block for every listing

Paste this under the photographs on every product page and marketplace listing, filled in for that piece.

• Outside size (W x D x H): in cm and inches
• Seat height and depth: for sofas and chairs; for beds, the mattress size inside the frame, in inches
• Largest piece as delivered: carton or frame size, and its weight
• Comes apart: legs, arms, back, headboard, or nothing
• Measure before ordering: lift door and car, narrowest door, staircase turn
• Material: frame, panels, drawers and back, in plain words
• Assembly: arrives assembled, carpenter visit, or flat-pack with video
• No lift? Carried up or not, and any charge per floor
• If it arrives damaged: check before signing, photo or video, who to message, what happens next
• Delivered to: the cities or pin codes you serve

A line such as "Largest piece 212 x 96 x 40 cm, 38 kg, legs unscrew" answers the question that would otherwise come as a message. Writing this across two hundred pieces is website content writing work, and it comes before any ad spend.

For example: the "king" bed that did not take a king mattress

For example, a furniture workshop in Kartarpur, Punjab, sells carved beds and side tables online. Its storage bed is listed as "king size, solid wood, hydraulic storage". The frame takes a 72 x 75 mattress. That is the workshop's king. A buyer in Hyderabad orders it for a 72 x 78 mattress that was also sold to them as king.

The bed arrives undamaged and well made. The mattress rides three inches up over the foot rail, and the storage lid will not sit flat under it. The buyer asks for a return. Freight each way is about ₹6,000 in this illustration, the bed comes back with a scuffed corner that needs a repair, and the review says "wrong size", which is fair from where the buyer stands.

The workshop changed the words, not the bed. Every bed listing now opens its fit block with "Takes a 72 x 75 inch mattress (inside the frame)", and the title carries the same numbers after the word king. A 72 x 78 version is offered beside it at its own price. In this illustration the workshop cannot say how many orders the longer title cost it, but the wrong-size returns on beds stopped. Before dispatch, the WhatsApp confirmation asks for a photo of the label on the buyer's mattress, because that label is what the buyer will measure against.

When to keep a piece off your online catalogue

Not every piece belongs online, and leaving one off is a decision, not a gap. A large wardrobe made to measure is a risk on a pan-India listing. So is a solid wood dining table that ships whole. Sell those in the cities your own team delivers to, after a site visit or a measured drawing. Skip assembly-required pieces in any city where you cannot send a carpenter, unless you sell them flat-packed with a proper video. On your own site, a pin code check before the cart keeps these pieces from being ordered where you cannot serve them, which is a small part of e-commerce website development.

Measure the beds first

Measure the inside of every bed frame you sell with a tape, not from the drawing, and write the mattress size into the title. Then write the fit block for the sofas. Measure the largest piece as it leaves the workshop. Furniture is one of the trades on our e-commerce sales and marketing page. If you want the catalogue, the listings and the site rebuilt around fit, tell us what you need.