Furniture Store Stars Told Me Nothing About the Phone

For about eight years I believed that a business with a wall of good reviews had a decent website sitting behind it. Furniture stores are the trade that finally talked me out of it.

It felt like a safe bet at the time. An owner who bothers to ask every single customer for a star rating is an owner who cares what strangers think of her, and caring what strangers think is most of this job.

If you sell sofas for a living, your Google listing is almost certainly in better shape than mine. Your website probably isn’t, and it took me a full day of checking to work out why.

The order I go in

I audit the same way every time, because changing the order is how I start missing things.

The listing first. Then whether the page opens, and whether it opens safely. Then the phone. Then the code. Then the parts a human being actually reads.

This spring I ran that whole sequence across 2,680 furniture businesses in 24 markets, then compared every check separately against every other trade I keep.

Two of those results sent me back to check my own working.

Stop one: the listing

I never open the website first, because your customer doesn’t either.

She’s standing in her kitchen with four shops on a map in front of her, and every one of them is a name with gold stars underneath it or a name with nothing underneath it at all.

Pool every small business I audited and that number comes back at 88%. The shops on her map with nothing beneath the name are hardly ever yours, because stars turn up under 96.3% of the furniture listings I pulled.

Near the top of everything I collect, and comfortably the healthiest habit this trade owns anywhere.

You’re already doing the hardest part of this job, and I doubt you’d call it marketing if I asked you to.

It also isn’t a habit anyone can buy for you, which is exactly why I take it seriously as a signal about the business underneath. You’ve just sold a woman a sectional she argued about with her husband for three weeks, and now you’ve got to look her in the face and ask her for a favor.

Most trades flinch at that part. Yours doesn’t, and I’ve stopped being surprised by it.

When did you last ask a customer for one? Not a card by the till. Out loud, to a face, in a doorway.

So I went into the rest of the audit expecting the same care all the way down. Wouldn’t you?

Stop two: the door

Second stop is the door itself. Locked, and locked properly, which is two separate checks this trade quietly wins without ever mentioning them to me.

There’s nothing to report, and I mean that as a compliment.

Two stops in, furniture stores were beating nearly everyone I collect.

And you didn’t have to do a thing to earn it. The lock came with the hosting, which is worth holding onto, because the next stop is where the free wins run out.

Windsor’s one win over the rest of the country arrived the same way, out of software nobody in town chose on purpose.

Stop three: the phone

Two entirely different questions live at this stop, and owners run them together nearly every time I bring the subject up. You hear the word mobile and assume it’s one job with one answer, when the audit is really asking two things that happen to arrive on the same piece of glass.

The first asks whether a page loaded at the width of a phone can be read and tapped by a person holding it in one hand, with no pinching and no dragging sideways to find the price.

71.0% of furniture store sites pass that one, against 78% of every site I audited, and almost nothing else I checked came in lower.

I read that result three times before I believed it, then went back to the raw numbers and pulled a dozen of the failures up on my own phone to make sure the machine hadn’t invented them.

It’s sitting right beside the best number I have anywhere, on the same businesses, gathered in the same week.

The second question is time. How long does the page take to show up on a phone, on the sort of connection people have standing in a parking lot rather than the wifi in your office?

Furniture comes back at 53 out of 100 on that one, and pooling every small business I tested lifts it only as far as 58 out of 100. Since Google doesn’t call a performance score good until it reaches 90, neither of us should feel clever about the gap between those two.

Fitting a phone and arriving on one are different jobs entirely. Your trade’s behind on both, and the first one is the cheap one.

So which of the two is your own page failing? My money’s on both, and only one of them costs you a weekend.

Stop four: the code

Nothing at this stop made me look twice in either direction.

Your titles are written, your labels are in place, and the software dropped every one of them in without anybody in your building being asked a question. Boring is the correct outcome there.

You didn’t buy any of that and nobody’s going to congratulate you for it. It arrived with the software, the way a lock arrives on a new front door.

Stop five: the part a person reads

Last of all I go through the page the way a woman with a bad back and a tape measure would.

What does it ask her to do? How difficult is that thing to do on the device she happens to be holding?

82.5% of furniture businesses have a website at all, which puts them a shade under the middle of the trades I ranked on that one, so this isn’t a trade that quietly skipped the internet and hoped nobody noticed.

Your shop is built. Your door is locked. Your stars are on the sign.

Then she walks in and finds a room that was arranged for a different body entirely.

Arranging the room around whoever is actually standing in it is most of what I get paid for.

When did you last hand your phone to a friend and watch them try to buy something from you on it? It’s an ugly ninety seconds and I’d recommend it to everyone.

Two numbers, one customer, thirty seconds apart

She reads your stars on the map. She taps. She lands on a page drawn for a laptop, and now she’s got to pinch and zoom to work out whether the couch comes in grey.

One owner told me flatly that nobody buys a couch on a phone. He was right about the buying and wrong about the deciding, which happens two hours earlier.

Nobody complains about that. She simply returns to the map, which still has three other shops on it, every one of them wearing stars of their own and every one of them a single tap away.

Your reviews bought the tap. The phone lost the visit.

And the reviews were the expensive half of that exchange. You’ve earned them one awkward conversation at a time, over years, and then handed the whole result to a page that can’t hold a thumb.

The uncomfortable part is that both of those numbers came off the same list of businesses in the same week, which means the owner who remembered to ask for the review is the same owner nobody ever told about the phone.

Nobody tells you at quoting time either. Three quotes landed on a Houston owner’s desk and not one of them raised it.

Which of those two would you rather have to build again from nothing?

What the ten checks add up to

Furniture stores land on 72 out of 100 overall, which renders 26 of 47. The score is a weighted average of ten checks, so a trade can own the finest habit on the entire list and still sit in the middle of the table.

Middle of the table, holding the strongest review number I have anywhere. That combination is what put your trade at the top of my list this month.

I’d been treating the review number as a shortcut for most of my career. Good stars, careful operator, probably a decent website, on to the next one.

Now I read it as evidence of exactly one thing, which is that someone in the building is brave enough to ask a customer for a favor. Every other habit has to be checked on its own.

Tell me your trade is different

I might be wrong about your shop. An average has never once walked into a showroom, and your store is one row inside 2,680 of them.

You don’t need my permission to check any of this, and you certainly don’t need my opinion. You need your own phone and a parking lot.

So argue with me. Send me your address and I’ll open it standing outside on my own phone, and if it holds up on that screen I’ll put it in writing so you can forward the email to whoever built it.

I rebuild these sites for a living, so I’m hardly a neutral party here. I’d still rather be argued with than agreed with, and furniture is the trade most likely to have a decent argument ready.