FurnishNet volume hits $4.1 billion in 2007
Transaction total rises 13%
Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, January 31, 2008
SAN DIEGO — FurnishNet’s numbers for 2007 underline the dramatic, sustained growth in business-to-business e-commerce in the furniture industry.
FurnishNet reported volume of $4.1 billion on its electronic transaction exchange service last year, and nearly 1.2 million purchases processed.
With an average purchase order of $3,500, FurnishNet’s 2007 transaction total was a 13% increase over 2006, when it processed just over 1 million orders. The total for 2005 was 879,000.
Part of the growth resulted from the exchange attracting new partners. FurnishNet began 2007 with 750 manufacturers and ended the year with 1,257.
A total of 1,417 trading partners are connected through FurnishNet, including 45 of the Furniture/Today Top 100 U.S. furniture stores.
Among the furniture sources signing on in the past few months are American Leather, Chintaly Imports, Drexel Heritage, GE Inds., Ital Sofa, Stanton and Vicky's Furniture.
The company estimates that its trading partners save $50 to $85 per purchase when compared to faxing orders and utilizing data entry processing. At that rate, FurnishNet estimates having saved its trading partners $58 million to $99 million in 2007.
“Throughout the past year, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in our number of trading partners that we attribute largely to the satisfaction of our existing customers,” said Ron Sellers, vice president at FurnishNet.
FurnishNet integrates Web applications, electronic data interchange, XML and e-mail to process more than 300 transaction types electronically between trading partners.
