Nearly There: Our Online Shop Is About to Open Its Doors

After a long stretch of evenings and a great deal of spreadsheet work, our office furniture online shop is nearly ready for you. Not a coming soon page with an email box on it. The actual shop, with products in it, prices on them and a basket that works.

I promised in an earlier post that I would say what was in it rather than describing it as comprehensive and hoping nobody asked. So here are the numbers.

What is live right now

• 443 product listings, covering 21,397 individual product codes. A listing is a thing you would recognise as a product, such as a desk. The codes are every width, depth, finish and frame colour of it, and each one has its own price and its own photograph.

• 48 categories, from task chairs to lockers to cable trays, arranged the way people actually shop rather than the way the supplier's catalogue is organised.

• Specification tables on effectively everything. Dimensions, weight ratings, fabric details, guarantee lengths, all printed on the page.

• Nearly 29,000 product photographs, filed against the exact variant they belong to, so picking the oak top shows you the oak one.

• 167 listings you can spin round in 3D, and stand in your own room at full size on a phone.

One price for every business on all of it, shown before VAT, with delivery costs visible before you confirm rather than after.

What took the longest

The product data, by a distance. A supplier sends a spreadsheet with a code, a name and a price. Turning that into a page that tells you the seat height range and whether the arms come off means going back and asking, often more than once, and occasionally deciding that two suppliers describing the same measurement differently cannot both be right.

Bundling was the other one. The temptation with 21,397 codes is to list all of them and let the search sort it out. That gives you a shop where a single desk appears four hundred times. Getting them grouped into 443 listings that each have sensible options took months, and it is the difference between a shop and a database with a checkout attached.

The photographs were a slog of a different kind. Suppliers rarely send one image per code, so a lot of the work was matching pictures to variants by hand and chasing the gaps. There are still ranges where the walnut and the grey oak share a photograph because only one exists, and those are on the list to put right.

What lands next

More 3D models, working through the ranges where the geometry justifies it. More product ranges, because we have suppliers whose catalogues are not on the site yet. And a steady grind of improvements to search, which is the part of any shop that is never quite finished.

Longer term, the plan is space planning built into the site, so you can lay a room out with the furniture you are looking at rather than describing it to us over email. That one is a way off, and I would rather mention it than pretend it appeared overnight when it lands.

There are rough edges. There will be a product somewhere with a photograph that does not match its finish, and a specification field that says the wrong thing because a supplier's data said the wrong thing first. If you find one, tell us. We would much rather fix it this week than leave it up for six months because everybody assumed somebody else had mentioned it.

Have a nose around

You do not need an account and nobody will ring you. Start with the shop if you want to browse, or go straight to office chairs or office desks if you already know what you are after. And if you know the colour before you know the model, there are pages for that too: black office chairs and white office desks.

Scroll down a product page to the specification table. That table is the whole reason we built this ourselves rather than renting somebody else's shop, and it is the bit I would most like you to see.