Right Price Furniture

Right Price Furniture is a British Furniture Retailer based on Brackla Industrial Estate in South Wales. It is neither one of the largest or oldest furniture retailers in the UK but is notable in that it was one of the first to be established primarily to sell its products over the internet.
The opportunity for online retailing
The company was founded in 2006 by Darren James, who had previously operated 11 traditional-style furniture showrooms across the south and West Wales region. His aim in founding Right Price Furniture was to be both a traditional and online furniture retailer.
The strategy of listing products on the internet enabled a relatively small retailer to reach customers throughout the whole of the UK while maintaining the operating costs of only one showroom. The low operating costs in proportion to the high volume of sales enabled prices to be substantially reduced in comparison to the prices charged by traditional High Street furniture retailers.
Critics initially claimed that customers would be resistant to buying furniture without having seen it first but this proved not to be the case. The principle of customers buying goods at a distance without having seen them first was pioneered by American entrepreneur Richard Warren Sears, founder of Sears, Roebuck and Company, whose famous catalogue included furniture in its pages for the first time in 1899.
Development of the online furniture market
Since 2006 there has been a rapid expansion in the number of online furniture retailers in the UK. Some of these are established retailers that have diversified to capture a share of this new market and others are purely online businesses.
As the market matures, more online retailers are developing a real, bricks-and-mortar showroom to support their online offer. One of the largest online furniture retailers, Oak Furniture Land, opened its new showrooms in March 2010. This is a demonstration by retailers of their credibility to potential customers and may also be to deter competition from unscrupulous traders trying to generate income without having a fixed, verifiable address.
Barriers to entry
Competition amongst furniture retailers for advertising space on internet search engines has seen prices increase significantly. This may become one of the greatest barriers to entry for new online retailers of conventional, mass-market furniture.

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