General
What is Open Furniture?Creating a Directory Listing
How does Open Furniture help my business?
What services are available?
How secure is Open Furniture?
How do you protect my privacy?
What are Business Locations?Collaborating with Other Businesses
How do I search for categories for my listing?
What are Customer Locations?
How do I use my Control Panel to manage my business listing?
What are Enhanced Listings?
What is the business directory?
What is a Directory Listing?
What is a Bold Listing?
What is a Priority Placement?
What is a Business Brief?
What is a Web Link?
What Combo Packages are available?
How do I communicate with other businesses within Open Furniture?Sending Quotes to Potential Buyers
What quotes can I send?Accessing Support
How do I use my Control Panel to manage quotes?
How will the buyer see my quote?
What support is available online?Introduction to Selling
What live support is available?
What does Open Furniture offer my company to help me sell products and services?
Is my company eligible to be listed within Open Furniture?
Why should I list my business in Open Furniture?
How can I increase my customer base?
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We provide business and commerce services to tens of thousands of companies across diverse industries. From buying to selling, we support your online business with our professional technical support and the best customer service anywhere.
How does Open Furniture help my business?
The Buyers Guide will bring buyers to you when they need the products or services you offer. Sales leads come to you in the form of 'Power Requests' submitted by buyers who are looking to buy exactly what you have signed up to sell.
Open Furniture offers web-based services to help our members conduct business electronically within the Open Furniture exchange. As you use the services, you will always have access to support documentation as well as live support personnel 24/7.
Open Furniture is designed with the highest levels of security in mind. We operate the latest and most secure Internet security standards, ensuring that your sensitive information is safe. We never store your credit card information - this information is kept directly by our payment processing institutions according to the strictest practices in the financial industry.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at security@openfurniture.com and one of our specialists will be glad to assist you.
How do you protect my privacy?
The privacy of our members is a top priority for us. The exchange will not function successfully unless privacy for all members is carefully guaranteed. We implement the strictest standards for member privacy. We will never sell your business information any other companies - this includes your personal information, transaction history, messages, or any other data. We may analyze aggregate transaction behaviors (for instance, monitoring when during the day trading is heaviest), but will never associate any personally identifying information with such analysis.
For more information, see our privacy policy statement.
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These are areas you can deliver your products and services from. Buyers can search for suppliers based on location. Therefore, select all areas where your business is located. If your business is a service business, select areas where you have offices.
How do I search for categories for my listing?
- Start by entering up to five category keywords. Don't get too specific.
- Matching categories will be displayed so that you can select specific categories.
- You are not limited to five categories. You will be able to select as many as you like later.
Select areas you can deliver your products and services to. When selecting individual areas, to select more than one area within a region, hold down the Ctrl key before each selection. If you can do business anywhere within a region, select "All areas in this region."
How do I use my Control Panel to manage my business listing?
You can access your Control Panel at any time by signing in to this site. Within your Control Panel, you can update your business listing at any time.
When buyers conduct searches and find your business listing, they will decide whether to send online RFQs to you. Therefore, it is important to keep your business listing compelling and accurate.
There are different Enhanced Listings to help you distinguish your company from the competition:
Bold Listing - stand out from the crowd and get your listings noticed.
Business Brief - tell everyone exactly what makes your company special.
Priority Placement - put your listings first, in front of the regular listings.
Web Site Link - let buyers link directly to your web site.
What is the business directory?
The Open Furniture business directory contains tens of thousands of business from all over the world.
As a business member of the Open Furniture exchange, you have available to you a means for promoting your company to those individuals and businesses anywhere in the world with whom you can conduct business.
The first marketing avenue is to create a business listing that describes your business and exactly what sets your company apart from others. With a free listing, you can provide a business profile and descriptive information about your products and services.
We also offer premium services, such as the ability to get a priority placement, a bold listing, or a direct link from us to your website.
A Bold Listing lets a company stand out from the crowd. Statistics show that bold listings increase sales dramatically.
Priority Placement puts a company above regular listings and increases the chances of being selected over the competition.
A Business Brief explains exactly what makes a company special. It is a place to provide general information, advertise specials, introduce new products, etc. A company can change a Business Brief as often as is needed.
A Web Link button increases traffic to a company's web site. Buyers can link directly to a web site with a click of the mouse.
What Combo Packages are available?
All of our packages can be viewed in the supplier plan pages.
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How do I communicate with other businesses within Open Furniture?
Each registered member has a free, personalized Control Panel. One of the capabilities of the Control Panel is to send and receive secure, private messages. The Control Panel contains all messages sent and received to other businesses within the exchange. The messages are organized into folders that you can customize.
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When a prospective individual or business is interested in learning more about your company and offerings, you will receive an electronic RFQ. Then, if you are interested in winning their business, you can easily send them an electronic quote. The quote will automatically be accompanied by information about your company.
In the quote, you can offer custom pricing and other options. You can also invite the interested buyer to communicate with you online. All of your messages will be stored in a secure and private message board.
If you are chosen as the winning provider, then you can continue to work with the buyer through your Control Panel.
How do I use my Control Panel to manage quotes?
The Control Panel is the primary service for managing the receipt of RFQs and the creation and sending of quotes. As you interact with prospective and current customers, the Control Panel will help you manage your bidding activity.
How will the buyer see my quote?
The buyer will be sent a notice through e-mail to check their company RFQ folder which they can find online through our website.
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What support is available online?
Our How-To Guides are designed to offer easy-to-understand answers to the questions most often asked by our members. Each How-To Guide is a one-stop location for a given business activity and is designed to help you get the most out of using our site.
If you do not find the answer to a question you have, you may contact us via chat, e-mail, or phone. We make a concerted effort to take the general questions that members have and insert them into the appropriate How-To Guide.
What live support is available?
We strive to offer the best live support anywhere, on the Net or off. In order to meet our goal of assisting you with any of your questions or concerns, we offer a number of diverse options for receiving live support.
Express Ticket: Fill out an online 'express ticket' with your question and it will be routed to an available support specialist. You will receive an electronic answer as quickly as possible!
E-Mail: We have dedicated customer service and technical support personnel ready to respond to your e-mail queries as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Live Chat: We offer a very responsive and interactive means for chatting online in real-time with a trained support specialist. No special software is needed.
Phone: We pride ourselves on offering industry-leading phone support. Simply pick up the phone, any time of day or night.
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What does Open Furniture offer my company to help me sell products and services?
Open Furniture has a comprehensive business directory that contains detailed listing of companies worldwide that provide products and services. Any individual or business looking to purchase online can use our free tools to find and contact the most suitable provider. Potential customers use Open Furniture to find businesses. They can then send RFQ's to the ones that they choose.
Is my company eligible to be listed within Open Furniture?
Any business that offers products or services is eligible to be listed within Open Furniture. You can select the categories that your company will be listed under.
Why should I list my business in Open Furniture?
Suppliers privately receive competitive quotes faster than ever before. Suppliers can increase sales without the high cost of marketing campaigns or hiring sales personnel.
How can I increase my customer base?
To increase sales and improve your market opportunity, you should try to portray the following business values:
- Provide value to customers. This can be done by offering a product or product line that is attractive to potential customers and available at a competitive price.
- Provide service and performance. This can be done by offering a fast, user- friendly purchasing experience.
- Provide an attractive site. This can be done by the tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white space percentage.
- Provide an incentive to buy and to return. This can be done with sales promotions like coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked web sites, and advertising affiliate programs can also be used.
- Provide personal attention. This can be done by personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers.
- Provide a sense of community. This can be done with chat- rooms, message boards, soliciting customer input, and affinity programs.
- Provide reliability and security. This can be done by parallel servers, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls.
- Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship. This can be done by ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer.
- Own the customer’s total experience. This can be done by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.
- Streamline business processes. This can be done through re- engineering and information technologies.
- Let customers help themselves. This can be done by providing a self-serve site that is easy to use without assistance.
- Help customers do their job. This can be done by providing ample comparative information and good search facilities.
- Construct a sound business model. If this key success factor would have been included in the textbooks in 2000, many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.
- Engineering an electronic value chain in which you focus on a limited number of core competencies.
- Operate on or near the cutting edge of technology and stay there as technology changes.
- Create an organization that is alert enough, and agile enough to quickly respond to any changes in the environment.
