Furniture.com Shifts From Aggregator to Marketplace With AI Agents

Buying furniture online these days is about as easy as hauling a sofa up a flight of stairs. Consumers browse multiple tabs, track shipping timelines in spreadsheets and screenshot products to consult with partners before finally making a purchase.

That’s if they make one at all. Awaiting the more determined shopper is the task of navigating a maze of sites, carts and checkout forms. Furniture.com wants to change all that. GM Dan Russotto is steering the company from aggregator to marketplace, where discovery and purchase live under one roof.

“What we’re hearing from the consumers when we do our surveys and user research is that they all want a trusted place where they have the confidence to know that they’re buying good brands,” said Dan Russotto, General Manager of Furniture.com, in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “They don’t want name brands from who knows where. They want to shop in one place, keep it organized, keep it tracked.”

Russotto’s answer to that consumer is two-fold. The first is a major business model pivot to a multi-brand marketplace and checkout experience that he believes will remove friction from the late stages of the buyer journey. Furniture.com will transition from an aggregator to a marketplace. Russotto says it will keep more customers on the site and more transactions flowing to its retail partners.

Russotto, who previously led product at Apartments.com and Homes.com under CoStar, draws a direct line between what worked in real estate marketplaces and what could work in furniture. “At Apartments.com, the network effect of putting competitors side by side turned out to be more beneficial for everyone than they thought,” he said.

For example, putting competitors side by side means Furniture.com can eliminate the friction from going from merchant to merchant. Consumers have better opportunities to put their rooms together, and it then becomes the platform for upsell and cross-sell opportunities for merchants.  Russotto is betting that those benefits will happen early and often, as keeping customers in purchase mode will set them up for the second step in Russotto’s plan: eliminating the last big friction point, fragmented checkout. A new partnership with Firmly and agentic AI aims to give shoppers a single, seamless way to buy across merchants.

The Firmly Factor

Firmly is an agentic commerce platform that embeds multi-retailer checkout into high-intent shopping environments. The integration lets shoppers fill a single cart with products from multiple furniture retailers and check out once, without jumping between sites. Behind the scenes, Firmly’s AI-driven agents execute the purchases directly on each retailer’s own site.

“It’ll feel similar if you’ve ever been on Travelocity,” Russotto said, and booked a Delta flight, a Marriott hotel, and a Hertz rental car. “You know you’re not flying on a Travelocity plane.” Each retailer keeps its role in the transaction, and more importantly, keeps the customer relationship.

Unlike other marketplaces that obscure buyer data, Furniture.com’s approach gives retailers full access to shipping, payment, and contact details, enabling them to retarget those customers directly. For retailers wary of being “abstracted” by intermediaries, that transparency has proved a selling point.

The integration also pulls real-time inventory and pricing data before checkout, ensuring that shoppers see up-to-date availability and costs. “We’ve already doubled our return user rate in the past 12 months,” Russotto said. “We think this will more than double it again in the next year…because it’s one less hop for the consumer.”

Future Fits

As for what’s under consideration for the future: cross-retailer promotions and perhaps financing options. So is a feature called “Will it Fit,” designed to address one of the industry’s most expensive problems: returns due to sizing mistakes. As Webster noted, there’s always that moment of realizing the chair’s to wide to get through the doorway.

Instead of requiring shoppers to take precise measurements, the tool would ask a series of simple questions such as home type, square footage, and preferred layouts to estimate fit and flag potential issues before checkout. Personalization is another focus. While Firmly’s role is centered on transaction execution, Furniture.com’s own infrastructure is being tuned to deliver product recommendations and content tailored to individual shoppers’ needs.

In the meantime, while macroeconomic uncertainty has weighed on the home furnishings sector in recent years, due to slowing housing turnover and consumers delaying big-ticket purchases, Russotto sees signs of renewed momentum.

“Interest rates and tariff questions have created noise, but that noise is dying down,” he said. “In the last several months, sales have been strong for many of our partners.”

With those tailwinds, Furniture.com is positioning itself to capture a greater share of retailers’ revenue while helping those brands capture a greater share of consumers’ wallets.

“The consumer wanted the confidence to know they could see a purchase all the way through,” Russotto said. “We want to be known as the confidence engine for furniture.”