How to Read a Furniture Website Price

Every office furniture website prints a price. That part is easy. The harder part is working out whether the number on the screen is the price you will pay, or the price you pay if you do not know any better.

If you buy chairs once every five years, you are often in the second group, and the trade has known that for decades.

Three quotes for the same chair, three different totals, and only one person in the building who can explain why: that is the normal outcome when nobody on the page told you the rules.

When the list price is an opening bid

In most of the trade, the figure on the page is a list price. It exists so there is something to discount from. The dealer bought at a trade price well below it, and the final number depends on the conversation: how many desks you sound as though you might need, whether you have a competing quote, whether you mention a framework, and whether you know to ask.

The buyer who asks gets a discount. The buyer who does not ask pays what is on the page. That is not a mistake in the system. It is the system.

It tends to hit the office manager at a forty-person firm, the practice manager sorting out a surgery, or the founder who signed a lease on Friday and needs twelve desks before the end of the month. No procurement team, no framework supplier, no time to find out the price was negotiable.

What to check before you trust the number

You cannot see inside someone else's margin, but you can see whether the page is helping you buy or hoping you will ring first.

• Look for a strikethrough or a "call for best price" line. If the site shows a list price crossed out and a lower price beside it, someone has already discounted you. Ask who gets the lower figure by default.

• See whether the price changes after you fill in a form about headcount or timescale. That form is doing the same job the showroom phone call did: working out how big you are before the number appears.

• Check whether delivery and installation sit in the price or beside it. A chair with delivery "on application" is not a figure you can budget from.

• Read the spec table, not just the headline. A cheap chair with no weight rating, no warranty and no fabric code is a number without enough behind it to be a decision.

• Compare like with like. Two quotes at £180 and £240 might be the same chair with different delivery terms, or different chairs with the same stock photo. Match dimensions, warranty and fabric before you match price.

If you are working to a budget, our office chairs under £250 cut and our office desks from £250 to £500 page are useful starting points because the band is printed, not held back for a follow-up email. For the full range, browse computer task chairs and office desks with specifications on every listing.

When a phone call is fair, and when it is a stall

A full fit-out can need a survey, phasing and an out-of-hours crew. No page can price a floorplate with columns, lift timings and a reception that has to stay open. A proper quote for space planning or installation is fair.

Using the call only to find out your budget before revealing what the chair costs is something else. If the line is "we can do better on the phone" and the site already showed a price, the page price was never the offer.

What a fixed price page looks like

A fixed price is dull in a good way. The figure is ex VAT, the same whether you order one chair or twenty, and the delivery options are priced before anything reaches the basket. Open a listing such as the Eclipse Plus medium-back task chair beside a desk from our range, read the dimensions and fabric on the page, and argue about colour instead of whether the quote was real.

That is what we built Deskwell for. Chris also wrote the trade-side argument for Workplace Insight this week: The office furniture price on the page has always been an opening bid. Read that if you want the longer story about who the habit serves and why it survived the move online.