The home furnishings discovery platform Furniture.com is adding a new technology partner to reduce friction for shoppers on its website.
In an announcement, Furniture.com described its relationship with the agentic commerce platform firmly as a “strategic partnership.” Firmly is a vendor that provides embedded checkout infrastructure.
The new announcement comes after Firmly and Perplexity, the artificial intelligence (AI) search provider, revealed that they would work together to make Perplexity an ecommerce destination.
How Furniture.com is working with Firmly
“Buying furniture online today feels more like project management than shopping,” said Alex Seaman, founder and senior vice president at Furniture.com. “You’re comparing prices across tabs, tracking delivery timelines in spreadsheets, and trying to feel confident about a decision that impacts your home and lifestyle.”
Furniture.com’s features are geared toward simplifying and consolidating the research process. Its checkout system will address the last step in that flow.
The average Furniture.com shopper opens six to 12 tabs, takes up to four weeks to decide on a major item, and relies on a combination of screenshots, spreadsheets and partner input before buying, according to the company’s internal analytics.
It now hopes that the introduction of agentic AI into the checkout process will streamline the process.
The role of firmly for Furniture.com
“Furniture shopping is a deeply considered, high-intent journey as consumers explore, compare, and commit,” said Kumar Senthil, co-founder and CEO at firmly. “Our integration with Furniture.com is designed to meet them exactly at that moment, delivering speed and confidence while reducing friction at checkout.”
The move comes in a year when online furniture sales have faced headwinds.
Online furniture sales fell 0.4% year over year in 2024 for the 193 U.S.-based online retailers in the Housewares & Home Furnishings category from Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. There, Wayfair occupies the No. 1 spot among online retailers.
Industry watchers point to what Furniture.com is doing as the future of furniture shopping.
“Furniture.com eliminates the most significant obstacle in purchasing furniture online — retail navigation hassle — with the implementation of agentic AI at the checkout,” said Luke Hickman, chief marketing officer at the digital marketing agency Bird Marketing. “This not only enhances the buying experience but also encourages completion of the purchase, which increases customer satisfaction.”
Hickman added that the use of AI in multi-brand checkouts will likely become standard in ecommerce, particularly in the high-value furniture retail market.
Implications for B2B sales
The results have the potential to send ripple effects beyond retail and into the B2B ecosystem.
“For B2B companies, the change means that product information must be clean, properly organized, and in a format understandable by AI algorithms,” Hickman stated. “Merchants will have to work with agents that follow agentic checkouts while preserving the brand and customer information.”
Rohit Garewal, the CEO at the consultancy Object Edge, agrees that the B2B implications will be significant.
“In B2B, imagine saying, ‘Buy 5,000 units from approved vendors at the lowest landed cost, factoring in lead time, compliance, and past defect rates,’ and the agent executes in minutes,” Garewal said.
In Garewal’s opinion, there are no portals, email chains or approval bottlenecks with which to contend when using agentic solutions.
“Agentic AI collapses cycles from weeks to minutes,” he explained. “It also disrupts the ad model: If your buyer is an agent, not a human, how do you influence the buy? You’re no longer marketing to eyeballs; you’re marketing to algorithms. That’s the next frontier, and most companies aren’t even preparing for it.”
Mine Bayrak Ozmen, co-founder of the ecommerce platform Rierino, said that for B2B, what Furniture.com is doing is transformational.
“The real transformation comes when the same AI agents that close the sale also coordinate the messy dependencies behind the buy button, such as stock verification, logistics scheduling, financing, installation, and returns,” Ozmen stated.
She believes what Furniture.com is doing will spread quickly into other complex retail categories, such as appliances, and into B2B transactions where a single “cart” may span multiple vendors, delivery constraints, tax rules and approval flows.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
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