Furniture e-tailers up the ante with innovations

Online home décor and furniture e-tailers such as Urban Ladder, FabFurnish and Pepperfry are set to give brick-and-mortar furniture retailers a run for their money.

These companies are all set to exceed the revenues of some of the largest, pan-India physical home décor/furniture retailers over the next 12 months.

Urban Ladder on Wednesday launched ‘Living Spaces’, an augmented reality app that can be downloaded on mobiles and tablets from Android and iOS app stores. The app helps users place life size models of sofas to visualise their entire living room, select multiple colour/seating options without the hassle of involving any physical furniture. The user experience mimics real life sofa buying patterns, where the price pops up for every different configuration of sofa that you try out. The experience is natural, where the sofa design takes into account imperfections of the real world like wrinkled cushions and details like fabric folding at the edges.

“From the launch of ‘Trial Room’ six months ago where we physically take sofas to user homes to experience it; to our Wardrobe mobile app launched in August, which allows users to try out different models/configurations of wardrobes; to Living Spaces, which improves the ‘touch and feel gap’ in online furniture buying; we are trying to delight customers with a near-perfect shopping experience,” Rajiv Srivatsa, COO and co-founder, Urban Ladder, told

“Trial Room contributes to 30 per cent of our revenue and we expect conversions to double with our Living Spaces app. Sofas have emerged as our best-selling category, contributing to an average ticket size of ₹20,000,” he said.

FabFurnish, which aspires to be the IKEA of India, offers customers in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR the option of 5,000 sq ft experience stores, where they touch and feel furniture after browsing and choosing what they want to buy on their website. Furniture assembly services, which FabFurnish offered customers in 10 cities, have now been extended to 70 cities across the country.

“We will soon offer physical home trials of furniture in cities such as Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai, where we don’t have experience stores. We have introduced a ‘plus’ sign on hot-sellers and new styles on product banners, which allows customers to click and buy directly without browsing through entire categories,” said Vikram Chopra, co-founder, FabFurnish.com.

Unlike Urban Ladder and FabFurnish, Pepperfry.com sells products of 75 large national and regional brands from which it accrues 50 per cent of its sales, while the rest come from products of small and medium speciality manufacturers across the country.

“We offer free delivery and assembly services to 137 cities, carpentry services to the top 36 cities, exclusive products not available in offline stores, and an app-like experience on our mobile site. This makes it easy for customers without the hassle of installing a mobile app and upgrading the app every time the operating system needs an upgrade,” said Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepperfry.com.

Home décor/furniture is a ₹1.8 lakh crore market in India, growing at 10-15 per cent annually. However, online players are growing at 300-400 per cent year-on-year. Pepperfry, which gets over 2 million visitors a month, is expecting to touch ₹1,000 crore in revenue by December 2015, from ₹350 crore now.

FabFurnish, which draws 2,50,000 visitors to its website everyday, is on track to achieve ₹200-crore revenue by December, and expects to triple to ₹600 crore by December 2015.

Urban Ladder attracts 1 million visitors to its website every month and is confident of touching ₹250 crore by March and ₹500 crore by September 2015. “Our revenue run rate will exceed that of the largest offline home décor/furniture store chain by September” said Srivatsa.