Nobody Buys a Couch on a Phone, Said the Furniture Store Owner

“Nobody buys a couch on a phone.”

He said it flatly, the way you’d say it about the weather, and he’s been right about it for the eleven years he’s owned the furniture store. Almost nothing in that showroom gets bought off a screen.

So I asked him what she does on the phone instead, and the call went quiet for a while.

She decides there. She just pays somewhere else.

Your customer is doing it tonight, on a sofa she already owns and would quite like to replace.

So I rebuilt one page of his site. Just the one, and it took an afternoon.

The page, before

The page was for one sofa, in three fabrics, on his floor for about two years and his best seller in all three.

Why one page? Because I’ve watched too many owners try to fix nine things at once and finish none of them, and because a single page is small enough that you can hold the whole thing in your head.

On a laptop it looked lovely. Wide photograph, swatches in a neat row, dimensions in a tidy table, a stock note, a button.

On his wife’s phone it was a different object entirely. I asked to borrow it, and I wrote all of this down while he waited.

• The logo ate the top third of the screen, so nothing about the sofa appeared until she had already scrolled.
• The menu opened over the whole page, and the little x for closing it sat off the right edge where a thumb couldn’t reach.
• The photo grid stayed three across, which meant each sofa arrived smaller than the price printed underneath it.
• The dimensions table ran off to the right, and you dragged the entire page sideways to find out how deep the thing was.
• Selecting a fabric took three tries, because the swatches sat in a huddle and my thumb kept landing between them.
• The phone number was part of a picture, so tapping it did nothing whatsoever.
• The opening hours sat in a footer that had shrunk to about the height of a hair.

Google’s mobile check has no opinion about whether that page is handsome, and neither do I. On his it asked whether a thumb could reach the price without a fight, and the answer came back no.

71.0% of furniture store sites pass that check, 45 of 47 among the trades I collect, against 78% of every small business site I audited.

His sat on the wrong side of that number and he had no idea, because he’d never once opened his own product page anywhere except at his desk.

His reviews are excellent, by the way. For years I took a wall of five stars as proof the phone version was fine, and this trade is where I stopped.

How much of that list is on yours? Go and look before you read the rest, because it reads very differently once you’ve seen your own version of it.

Why it happens, and why it isn’t your fault

Shopify runs 28.3% of the furniture sites I audited and WordPress another 22.8%, and a current theme on either of those handles a phone perfectly well without anybody being asked to think about it.

So the failures I find are hardly ever the platform underneath, and I’d like whoever sold you your last rebuild to read that sentence twice.

They’re a theme that was modern in 2016 and never touched since. They’re a specification table pasted straight out of a supplier catalog.

Or they’re a widget added on a Friday afternoon to solve one particular problem, which quietly broke the layout on every screen narrower than a laptop.

Nobody in your building did anything wrong on the day. The damage is two years of sensible decisions sitting on top of each other, which is why it never shows up as a single thing to blame.

I’ve never once found a page like his ruined by a single bad choice. Not once.

The theme was chosen by whoever happened to hold the login in the year it went up, and every change since then has been approved on a laptop by a person who never thought to turn a phone sideways and check.

When was the last time anyone opened your website on a phone that had never seen it before? Not your phone. Your phone has met that page a thousand times and has been quietly hoarding its pictures for months.

Clinics get the same homework from me. One tab open on a computer and one on a phone, and only one of them flatters you.

The page, after

Same sofa. Same photographs, same copy, same price. One afternoon of my time, and not one new idea in it.

• One column, top to bottom, with the main photograph the full width of the screen.
• The name and the price directly underneath it, in text she doesn’t squint at.
• Then the line that answers her real question. In stock, three fabrics, delivered in two weeks.
• The swatches as a row you push sideways with a thumb, each one big enough to hit on a moving bus.
• The dimensions as three lines of ordinary text, because a table was never the point, the depth was.
• A phone number that dials when she taps it, with the opening hours in the same size type as everything else.
• A short form underneath, for the ones who have decided but will not telephone a stranger at ten at night.

Nothing on that list is clever. Nothing on it is expensive. Every single item is a decision someone made once, badly, in a hurry, on a screen the shape of a place mat.

None of it is taste, either. Most of what makes a page easy to use is exactly this dull, which is half the reason it keeps getting skipped.

And none of it needed your opinion on fonts, which is my favorite thing about this kind of afternoon.

The page got quicker as well, which wasn’t the aim but happened anyway. Furniture sites average 53 out of 100 for phone speed against 58 out of 100 across every business I tested, and his had been carrying twelve photographs at full camera size for a grid displaying them the size of a business card.

Med spas do it with galleries rather than sofas, and the look they paid for is the last thing to arrive.

I ran the phone tests on 1,493 furniture websites to get that number, so his page wasn’t some unlucky afternoon on my laptop. Is yours carrying the same weight? Ask whoever looks after it what size those pictures leave your server at, and see whether the answer arrives quickly.

What she does with the new one

She still isn’t buying a sofa on a phone. He was right about that from the beginning and he’s right about it now, and I’ve stopped arguing with him.

What she does is arrive at your showroom already knowing the price, the fabric name and the delivery time, which changes what the first ninety seconds of that conversation are for.

How do your calls start at the moment? Mine used to start with people asking what I charged, which told me my own page was hiding it.

Before, his people spent the opening minutes of every enquiry reading dimensions down the telephone. Now they spend them talking about the room she’s furnishing.

One woman turned up on a Saturday with a fabric name written on the back of a receipt. He told me about her the way other clients tell me about a big month, and no chart I could have built would have landed half as hard.

The rest of his site is still the old thing, incidentally. I haven’t touched it and I’m in no hurry to. Why would I?

Do you know what your best selling page looks like in someone else’s hand?

Fix one page

Not the site. The page. That’s the only homework I’m giving you.

Pick the product your ads point at, or the one that sells whatever pays your rent, and give that single page an afternoon. Which one is it? You knew the answer before you finished reading the question.

I keep a gallery of furniture sites worth copying for exactly this, because arguing about a layout is far easier when you both have something to point at.

If the page is fighting the theme rather than the other way round, rebuilding these is most of my week, and I’ll look at yours before anyone talks about money.

The promise is deliberately small, which is the only kind I make about a single page. You won’t see a spike in anything. You’ll notice that your calls start further along than they used to, and one Saturday someone will walk in already knowing the fabric name. That’s a smaller promise than most people in my business would make you, and it’s the only one I can keep.