WooCommerce and furniture retailer
Lead times, spec sheets and the form that replaced the checkout
A large share of furniture sites running WooCommerce do not sell anything online. Add to cart has been swapped for an enquiry or quote form, the catalogue is a showroom in page form, and the sale happens on the phone. That changes what an assistant is for on this site, and it introduces a problem no ordinary store has: there are now two ways to send you an enquiry, and only one of them is being watched.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WooCommerce install guide covers the tag, and the furniture retailer guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Where add to cart has been replaced by a request a quote form, the conversion event on every product page is a form submission. The assistant also collects a name, an email and a message when a visitor wants a person, and those land wherever the install pointed them. Two doors, and the sales team is standing at one of them.
- The lead time usually lives in a product custom field or a plugin badge, and whether it reaches a crawler depends on whether your theme prints it into the page or a plugin paints it on afterwards. The same figure, the same site, two completely different outcomes.
- Furniture sites keep dimension drawings and fabric spec sheets as PDFs in the uploads folder, on your own domain, linked from the product page. That makes this one of the few trades where the PDFs are genuinely usable material, provided somebody checks they contain text rather than a scan of a drawing.
- Fabric choice is a variation, so a swatch grid stands in for the information behind it. The rub count, the suitability with pets and the behaviour in sunlight are in the PDF, and the page itself just offers twenty squares of colour.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WooCommerce guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a furniture retailer site specifically.
Point the handover at the inbox somebody actually reads
The address nominated for handovers is a decision, not a detail, on a site whose whole purpose is generating enquiries. Send it where the form goes. If the form goes into a system nobody can add an address to, send it to a shared mailbox rather than to one person, and make sure the person covering holidays knows it exists.
It is worth saying what the assistant should offer when somebody wants a quote. If the form is the process, the useful reply names the form and takes their details as a backstop, rather than quietly creating a second queue.
A furniture enquiry is a four figure order. This is not a tidiness argument.
There is no checkout to keep it off, so think about the other flows
A store without a cart has none of the usual decisions about the payment page. What it does have is a finance application and often an appointment booking, both of which are frequently a third party form embedded in a page. A script on the parent page does not run inside an embedded frame, so the launcher sits beside those flows rather than in them.
That is usually the behaviour you want. Somebody entering income details on a finance form is not looking for a chat, and the assistant has nothing useful to say about an application it cannot see.
Confirm the lead time is in the page rather than painted onto it
Load a product page and search the delivered source for the word weeks. If the number is in there, the theme is printing your custom field and the assistant can read it. If the badge is visible on screen but absent from the source, a plugin is adding it after the fact and none of your lead times are indexed.
This one is worth doing before you crawl rather than after, because a catalogue crawled without its lead times looks complete and answers the most important question in the trade with silence.
Where the answerable material lives
| A lead times page with a date on it | Ranges in weeks, per range, with the date the figures were last reviewed printed at the top. The highest value and shortest lived document in furniture retail. Publish the honest top of the range rather than the best case, because a quoted wait becomes part of what the customer agreed to buy. |
|---|---|
| Packaged dimensions as text, not only as a drawing | Width, depth, height and the packaged size for every item, written into the page. A dimension drawing is the right document for a fitter and the wrong one for an assistant, especially when it was scanned. The numbers a customer needs before measuring a doorway should be readable as numbers. |
| What the delivery crew will and will not do | Two person or one, room of choice or threshold, assembly, packaging removal, taking the old item away, and any charge above a certain floor. Each of those is a separate expectation, and every one of them goes wrong on the day when it was assumed rather than stated. |
| The guarantee split into its parts | Frame, upholstery and mechanism usually run for different periods and customers read only the headline number. Splitting them into labelled sections in the same document is what stops the assistant promising the frame's cover on a reclining mechanism. |
The first thing to get right
Publish the lead time table as its own page with a reviewed date, and link it from every product page.
It is the question that arrives before the order and the complaint that arrives during the wait, and a page you maintain beats a custom field you cannot be sure was ever crawled. The reviewed date is not decoration: it is what lets you tell, six weeks later, whether the assistant is quoting something you still stand behind.
The failure that belongs to this combination
Two ways to enquire, and one of them is unwatched
Talking to the assistant is easier than filling in a form, so a meaningful share of visitors will do that instead. They will describe the sofa, ask about the wait, and then leave a name and an email when it offers to have somebody call.
Those handovers arrive by email at whatever address was set during the install, which on a hurried Friday is often somebody's personal work address. Meanwhile the sales process is built entirely around the form, so nobody is looking, and the enquiry sits unopened next to a marketing newsletter.
Fix it at install time and then test it like a customer: open the site in a private window, ask the assistant for a callback about a sofa, and see where that email lands and who opens it. If the answer is nobody, you have built a lead generator that leaks.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a furniture retailer visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- We do not sell online. Is this still worth doing?
- It is arguably worth more. When the sale happens on the phone, everything before the phone call is qualification, and the questions that decide whether somebody picks up the phone are lead times, delivery inclusions and whether the piece will get into the house. Answering those at eleven at night is the whole value.
- Can it read our fabric spec PDFs?
- If they are on your own site, linked from a page and made of text, yes. If they are scans of a printed sheet there is nothing in them to read, and no amount of indexing changes that. Check one before you assume the set.
- Will it tell somebody a sofa fits through their door?
- It should walk them through the access checklist and give the packaged dimensions, and it should stop there. The verdict belongs to whoever carries the thing, because a failed delivery costs you the crew, the vehicle and usually the sale. Take the details and let somebody call them.
Keep reading
- Installing on WooCommerceHook the script into wp_footer so it survives theme updates, keep it out of the parent theme, and stop a caching plugin from mangling it.
- Everything for a furniture retailerLead times, delivery access and assembly dominate furniture enquiries. What an assistant answers well, and where it must take a name.
- Excluding a regulated range on a store whose addresses do not distinguish itProduct permalinks carry no category, so the pharmacy range cannot be excluded by path. And on this platform the checkout is yours to put a widget on.
- Ten years of seasonal advice, all of it still liveTen years of dated advice posts are still live, the consent banner holds the script back, and April ends up answering a November question.
- Options that change the order, and the pages nobody links toFabric choices are modifiers, dimensions sit in custom fields, and the pages that answer a furniture question are orphaned in the footer.
- Finding the number the crawler actually readA lead time inside a CMS block has no address of its own, and the page it sits on is cached, so the crawler often reads a figure weeks old.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.