How to sell office furniture online: a plan for UK dealers

This guide is for office furniture dealers who sell chairs, desking and storage through quotes, a showroom and a rep, and want some of that trade on a website. (Clearing the desks out of your old office is a different job.) Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, an ecommerce platform that connects dealers to their suppliers’ catalogues, so we have a stake in the answer. Where Orbit comes up, we say what it does and on which plan.

The plan in one line: put the products that sell themselves online with prices, keep the projects that need a survey on a quote form, and get the product data from your suppliers instead of typing it.

Is selling office furniture online worth it for a dealer?

Start with realistic expectations. A CSIL survey of one hundred European office furniture dealers found web sales were still below 5% of their office furniture turnover, and called furniture ecommerce “a price-driven business” (worldfurnitureonline.com, report edition March 2020, checked 29 October 2026). The figure is old and not UK-only, but the lesson holds: the website will not replace the fit-out business, so don’t build it as if it will.

What a website does well is the small, repeat and urgent orders that cost the most to quote: a chair for a new starter, six pedestals for a team move, a monitor arm on a Friday. Each is a quote, an email chain and a pro forma today. Online, the buyer does the typing and pays before you order from the supplier.

Which office furniture sells well online, and what should stay quote-led?

Sort your range by one question: could a buyer choose this correctly without you seeing the room? If yes, give it a price and a basket button. If no, give it a good page and a quote form.

The usual answer is a hybrid: the left column as a normal shop, the right column as project pages with case studies and a contact form. That keeps the quote business intact and gives the rep something to send people to. On larger items, add a line saying bigger orders get a project price, so the buyer furnishing forty desks calls you.

How do you get supplier product data onto your website without typing it?

Do not type it. One task chair can come in a dozen fabrics, three frame colours and several arm options; across a few suppliers that is thousands of combinations, each needing a price, an image and a spec. The data already exists. You can import a spreadsheet or feed from each supplier and maintain it yourself, buy product data from a content service, or use a platform where suppliers publish their catalogue and dealers connect to it.

Orbit takes the third route, on every plan. You connect to a supplier on Orbit, tick the products you want, and they import with images, variants, brand, category and specs. Stock then syncs from the supplier. Cost and content changes wait in an Updates inbox for you to accept, or can be set to be accepted automatically. New supplier products can be set to import on their own; that is off until you switch it on. The methods are compared in how to get supplier catalogues onto your website.

The same connection handles the order. When a customer pays, Orbit raises one purchase order per supplier on that order, which you can leave as a draft to check or have sent straight to the supplier, and the supplier’s tracking flows back to your customer’s order. That works for suppliers connected on Orbit, and Orbit does not move money between you and the supplier. The model where the manufacturer delivers to your customer is in office furniture dropshipping in the UK.

How should you price supplier trade lists for the website?

Decide your rules before you import anything, because the first mistake dealers make online is confusing markup with margin. Take a chair with a trade cost of £180 (an assumption for the example):

• 40% markup: £180 × 1.4 = £252. Your gross margin is £72 ÷ £252 = 28.6%.
• 40% margin: £180 ÷ 0.6 = £300. Your gross margin is £120 ÷ £300 = 40%.

That £48 gap on one chair decides whether the channel pays for itself. Expect different rules by brand and product type: thinner on chairs every competitor lists, fatter on accessories and hard-to-find ranges. Then round to price points that look deliberate.

On Orbit those rules live on the supplier connection: a percentage markup, a percentage margin or a fixed amount, rounding to endings such as .99 or .95, and conditions that match by brand, category or cost band. “One brand’s chairs at 35% margin, everything under £20 at 60% markup” is two rules, not a spreadsheet. When a supplier’s cost change is accepted, the selling price is worked out again through the same rules, and a price you typed by hand is left alone. Worked examples, including list-less-discount price lists, are in markup vs margin for trade price lists.

Should office furniture prices show ex VAT or inc VAT?

VAT-registered buyers compare prices ex VAT because they reclaim it. Home workers and small organisations that are not VAT-registered think in inc VAT. Show the wrong one and you either look 20% dearer than the dealer next door or you surprise someone at checkout. The UK standard rate is 20% (gov.uk, checked 29 October 2026), so a £300 ex VAT chair is £360 inc VAT.

If most of your customers are companies, lead with ex VAT and show the inc VAT figure beside it. If you sell to both, let the buyer choose. Orbit has an ex VAT or inc VAT display setting on every plan, a VAT toggle shoppers can flip, and, for stores that show prices inc VAT, a switch that adds VAT to supplier prices that arrive ex VAT. UK rates of 20%, 5% and 0% are set up for you.

How do you charge for delivery and installation online?

This is where furniture differs from most things sold online. A chair goes by courier. A 1,600mm desk or a bank of lockers goes on a pallet or with a two-person crew, and the buyer may want it built, placed and the packaging taken away. Decide three things before launch:

• Delivery bands. Group products by how they travel (parcel, two-person, pallet) and charge per band rather than per kilo. Add postcode surcharges for the Highlands, islands and Northern Ireland if your suppliers charge you for them.
• Installation. Price it per item or per desk position, shown as its own line so the buyer sees what they are paying for. Above a set size of order, say ten workstations, switch to a project quote.
• Access. Ask about floors, lifts and parking before the crew is booked, because a fourth-floor walk-up costs an extra hour.

Orbit handles the delivery side with shipping classes (so lockers and chairs can carry different rates in the same basket), conditional rates and postcode rules per zone. Installation can be set up as its own product, or as a delivery method called “Delivery and installation” with its own price. The detail, including taking away old furniture, is in delivery and installation charges for office furniture.

How do you show finishes, fabrics and frame colours?

One product page per chair, with the options on it, beats forty near-identical pages that split your reviews and search traffic forty ways. Set up each range as one product with variants (fabric, frame, arms, desk size), give every option a swatch, and attach an image to each variant so the photo changes when the buyer picks a finish. If a finish has a longer lead time, say so on the page.

Colour and image swatches are built into Orbit, and variant images switch as the buyer chooses. For a product you have a 3D model of, the 3D Configurator plugin (£19.99 a month) lets the buyer change materials and colours on the model itself.

What photography and specs does an office furniture product page need?

Supplier imagery is usually good enough to launch with: a cut-out on white, a few angles and sometimes a room set. Later, add your own photos of the products that sell; a shot from your showroom is the one thing no other dealer selling that chair can copy.

The spec block matters more than the description. For a task chair: overall and seat dimensions, seat height range, maximum user weight, mechanism, fabric and its rub-test rating if the supplier gives one, warranty, lead time and whether it arrives built. For desks: sizes, height range, finishes and cable management. If a figure is missing, ask the supplier rather than guess. A wrong seat height is a return.

How do you handle trade customers and contract prices online?

Your best customers have agreed prices and will not use a website that shows them retail. There are two levels. The simple level: prices shown ex VAT, customer accounts with saved addresses, order history and a reorder button, and bank transfer accepted alongside cards. The full level: each customer company gets its own price list, several buyers sit under one account with different permissions, and each buyer has a spending limit.

On Orbit the simple level works on every plan. The full level is B2B, on the Enterprise plan only (£999 a month, or £749 a month billed yearly, ex VAT): company accounts with several users and permissions, trade sign-up with your approval, a price catalogue per company and a spending limit per buyer. Details are on B2B on Orbit. If you have only a handful of contract customers, keep them with the rep for now and move everyone else online first.

Should you list office furniture on Google Shopping?

Yes, once the product data is clean. Google shows products from a Merchant Center feed in free listings at no cost, across Search, the Shopping tab, Images and YouTube (support.google.com, checked 29 October 2026). For furniture the feed lives or dies on identifiers: Google recommends a GTIN for every product that has one from the manufacturer, and says a product whose GTIN you leave out could be disapproved (support.google.com, checked 29 October 2026). Supplier data usually carries the barcode and brand, and Orbit’s supplier sync brings both across where the supplier provides them.

Orbit’s Google Shopping feed plugin has a free tier and a £3.99 a month plan, with feeds for Microsoft, Meta, Pinterest and Snapchat alongside. Start with free listings, watch which products get clicks, then put ad budget behind the chairs and desks that already sell. Setup is covered step by step in how to sell on Google Shopping in the UK.

What should be on your launch checklist?

Pick the storefront first. Orbit’s theme store has office themes: Apex (comes set up with an office furniture category structure), Canopy, Depot (price-first), Index (big catalogues), Quorum (contract and fit-out work) and Conduit (trade, with a VAT toggle in the header). More on Orbit for office furniture dealers. Then work through this list before you tell a customer:

1. Buy-now and quote-led lists agreed with sales, so reps are not undercut by their own website.
2. Suppliers connected and products imported, with every product checked for an image, a price and a spec block.
3. Pricing rules set and spot-checked: pick ten products and work the margin out by hand.
4. VAT display decided, and a test order checked through to the VAT invoice.
5. Delivery bands, surcharges and installation set, then tested with a mixed basket to a Highlands postcode.
6. Swatches and variant images on every range with finishes.
7. Project pages and a quote form for the fit-out side.
8. Delivery, returns and installation terms written, including which items are made to order.
9. One real order placed end to end: payment, purchase order to the supplier, delivery, tracking email.
10. Merchant Center feed submitted, with no disapprovals on your top sellers.

How do you measure whether selling office furniture online is working?

Give it 90 days before judging, then look at five numbers every month:

• Online revenue and orders, split between new customers and existing accounts. Existing accounts moving small orders online save you admin even if revenue is flat.
• Gross margin by channel, after card fees and delivery.
• Quote requests from the website, and how many became projects. This can be the biggest return on the site, so count it.
• Admin time per order. A web order that needed three phone calls is not saving you anything.
• Returns and damage by product, so you can drop lines that cause more trouble than they earn.

Then widen it: more ranges from the suppliers whose products sell, and paid Shopping ads behind proven products. Starting from scratch rather than adding a channel? The general steps are in how to start an online store in the UK.