Furniture.com and Flex Pay Turn 77 Stores Into One Purchase

Watch more: Need to Know With Tom Botts of Flex Pay by Upgrade and Dan Russotto of Furniture.com

Nobody furnishes a living room one retailer at a time in their head.

The shopper is thinking about whether the sofa works with the rug, whether the tables fit, when everything will arrive and what the room will cost. Online, however, that single project can send the buyer through several websites, carts, delivery policies and financing offers.

That disconnect is what Furniture.com Co-Founder and General Manager Dan Russotto and Flex Pay President Tom Botts have set out to address. As announced on Tuesday (Aug. 11), Furniture.com is bringing products from 77 retailers into a common shopping and checkout experience. Flex Pay, a unit of Upgrade, is providing financing that can cover qualifying purchases from several of those retailers with one loan.

“We saw a problem in the industry where people were spending countless hours shopping across countless different sites, trying to make sense of everything,” Russotto told PYMNTS in discussing the partnership between the two firms. “And so what we decided was to solve that problem of information overload, to standardize all the things that people are seeing across all the brands that they love in one place.”

Furniture makes that harder than simply lining up identical products by price. Colors are described differently. Images are shot differently too. One sofa may offer an extended warranty, another white-glove delivery. Delivery schedules can differ even when several products are destined for the same room. Those details sit on different pages, under different headings and inside different retailers’ purchasing systems.

Furniture.com’s job is largely one of translation. It maps retailer data into common categories and retrieves the policies and services attached to individual products as the cart is assembled. Lilac and violet, Russotto noted, can both be mapped to purple. A delivery service or warranty remains specific to the retailer and product, but appears to the shopper in the same place and format.

Financing can make that administrative burden considerably heavier.

A consumer buying a sofa from one store and tables, lighting and a rug elsewhere may encounter a financing offer at each checkout. Taking those offers can leave the buyer with several applications and several obligations attached to what was, in practical terms, one household purchase.

Russotto put it plainly. “By the time they get to the third or fourth or fifth store, they start to be overwhelmed by the fact that they have these four or five different credit applications,” he told PYMNTS.

One Room, Several Merchants, One Loan

Flex Pay is designed to sit above those individual purchases.

Instead of applying separately at each participating retailer, a shopper can make one application for the combined purchase. If approved, the consumer receives one loan and manages one payment schedule even though the furniture comes from several sellers.

Botts said that matters because store-by-store financing can leave consumers trying to determine both how much they have borrowed and when each obligation must be paid.

“One of the problems with shopping in the furniture space is exactly what Dan talked about: multiple retailers, multiple options, et cetera, which then leads to multiple BNPL offers if this consumer wants to finance.” Multiple payments can sow confusion over what’s due when, and just exactly how much credit is being extended, he said.

The financing is not limited to the small-dollar, four-payment purchases often associated with BNPL. Botts said Flex Pay handles larger transactions and offers loans through some retail partners as high as $100,000.

Consumers still have to judge the cost of borrowing. Botts said Flex Pay presents the number of payments and interest due and provides three choices of term length at different interest rates. Rates can be as low as 0% when a participating partner offers that financing.

The arrangement also has to work without muddling who actually sold the furniture.

Russotto said Furniture.com communicates with retailers’ websites in real time, so the merchant receives the customer information and can handle confirmations and subsequent customer communication. Flex Pay uses a virtual card that can support charges from multiple merchants of record. For the retailer, Botts said, the payment resembles an ordinary customer transaction.

That is where the proposed win-win-win resides. The shopper can treat several purchases as one project. Furniture.com can keep the customer through checkout instead of handing the shopper off at the moment of purchase. The retailer still gets the transaction and the customer relationship.

The next piece is whether search itself can become less laborious. Furniture.com has launched Dottie, an AI agent tied to its own catalog. Russotto said the company is working on allowing it to favorite products, place them in carts and build rooms rather than merely answer product questions.

Watch the full interview with Tom Botts and Dan Russotto to learn more about:

Why the checkout has to accommodate different warranties, delivery services and retailer policies item by item.

How one Flex Pay loan can fund purchases when several companies remain the merchants of record.

Why Russotto and Botts believe the same transaction structure could work for purchases assembled across several sellers.