5 Tips for Buying Furniture Online {The Sauder Experience}

This is a sponsored conversation on behalf of Sauder. All opinions are my own.

Our youngest son has some “issues” with his chest of drawers… and that is putting it mildly. This piece of furniture has been passed around from place to place and person to person until finally coming to stay at our home. Since it falls apart frequently, there is an assortment of different screws holding the thing together. Yes, it is a mess.

Since we are staging our home for sale, I knew that we needed an update, for the safety of our boys and to present our home in a lovely way to prospective buyers. I decided to be brave about buying furniture online.

1. Know what you need

Since our boys share a bedroom, I wanted to find a chest of drawers that would work for both of them and avoid the mismatched furniture look as we prepare to sell our home. I measured the space and checked the color of the beds to try an obtain a close match.

After searching the internet, I visited Sauder.com and immediately found what I needed.

The Sauder website is super-easy to navigate and I love that you can shop by product, space, or collection. Since I knew what I wanted, I clicked straight through to “products,” but if I had been uncertain, I could have easily used the Sauder Style Lab to guide my selection.

2. Check prices

As I mentioned, Sauder is not the only online furniture retailer I checked. I browsed big box retailers online as well as smaller furniture stores, making me very aware of the expense I was going to incur to get a functional and NICE dresser, and you know we live on a TIGHT budget. However, I was surprised that Sauder offered a beautiful piece of furniture for such an affordable price!

So, I made my final selection – the Dresser from the Shoal Creek Collection in a Jamocha Wood finish for only $249 – and pushed through the check out process.

I loved that we received a shipping confirmation so I could track my purchase and anticipate the day it would arrive.

3. Inspect the shipment

When our furniture arrived, the box was insanely heavy. UPS left it on our front porch but I knew that I could not lift the box alone and waited for my husband who has a rolling dolly for moving heavy objects. Once inside, we removed the pieces and found…

Uh oh!

Yeah, these things happen when buying furniture online, but if they can fix it, the savings makes the experience worth the small trouble.

I read great things about Sauder Customer Service – how they were award-winning – but you just never know how a situation like this will go and I needed the part replaced quickly. So, I sat down with my laptop and started a chat with a representative.

Our online chat was less than ten minutes long and my replacement part was on the way with expedited shipping at no additional charge to me. Awesome!

I even received another confirmation letter in the afternoon when the replacement piece shipped, and it was delivered in two days.

4. Cover the floor

So, we were back in the furniture construction business, and we did another quick inventory to make sure everything was ready.

In order to maintain the gorgeous finish, we covered the floor with blankets because we are still living on concrete until our new floors are installed. Even so, unless you are putting furniture together on a carpeted surface, it is always smart to lay down a soft blanket.

Bill and I are pros at putting together furniture. As a matter of fact, we have put together almost every piece of furniture in our home, and the dresser came together as quickly as you can expect without any alignment problems.

I have to stop and mention one major difference between the Sauder dresser and all other furniture we have previously assembled. My husband was repeatedly stating how the attention to detail and support were surprising. He was stunned by the quality of furniture bought through a website.

5. Verify safety

As he made a final check to see that every screw and nail was tight and secure, he mentioned that the intent of Sauder to provide safe furniture was evident and that we could be confident our boys had a much better piece of furniture in their room.

Being completely honest… I expected a ton of problems with our purchase. I expected the package to be destroyed in shipping. I thought the pieces would be battered and scarred upon arrival. I was afraid that the holes would not line up correctly… because these are all situations I had previously faced with other furniture we put together ourselves. However, none of these were an issue during our Sauder Experience.

As Bill and I moved the dresser into the boys’ room, we started making a list of the other pieces we needed to purchase. We plan on buying furniture online many, many more times from Sauder.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sauder. The opinions and text are all mine.