Is Your Black Friday Sofa Discount Really A Good Deal?

Some full price furniture retailers go to great lengths to hide the fact that their amazing deal on sofas is actually the exact same deal as everyone else’s.  They might achieve this by renaming the sofa, for example, or by comparing their price to the “manufacturer’s recommended retail price”. Some will present the same model with cheaper fillings or a low grade cover. Every year the Black Friday Furniture Sales are full of furniture retailers claiming to offer 25% off on a range of famous furniture brands, or that the sofa they’re currently selling is exclusively discounted only in their store. As we're about to reveal, it pays to do your own research when you're buying furniture, as these attractive discounts may not be as good as they first appear.

How to Find the Best Prices for Sofas Online

The first way you can combat this is by searching online for the manufacturer’s name, or the model name + manufacturer. A lot of comparison prices will be obvious once you start looking, but sometimes you’ll find that the retailers have renamed the sofa and you just can’t find it for sale anywhere. Fortunately, it’s still quite easy to find the real comparison price for yourself, because of one key fact: some furniture shops are lazy.

Don’t get me wrong here, most people in the furniture trade work extremely hard. They lay out their showrooms, bring in customers through clever marketing and sofa discount sales, and so on. What they don’t do is take their own photos. What does that mean? It means you can

Use Google Reverse Image Search to Find the Real Manufacturer of Your New Sofa

That’s right, google image search will do most of the hard work for you! All you need is a picture of the product as advertised. You can find full instructions on how to do a Google Image Search for sofas on Google’s support pages here.

If you use Google Chrome as your web browser, you can do this just by right clicking the image you want to search for and selecting “search Google for image”.

What happens when you reverse Image Search for a Sofa?

You should bring up several pages featuring the sofa you’re searching for, including the manufacturer’s page, and definitely the website where you found the picture. You’ll also find the websites of every other furniture retailer that is selling the same item using stock photos, which means that you can see exactly what all the other full price furniture stockists are selling it for!

How to Make Sure Your Sofa Sale Price is Real

You might be surprised to find out that, while most retailers will sell their sofas for around about the same price as everyone else, there’s always a few furniture stores that will push their luck by offering the same product at a hugely inflated price.

How Can Furniture Shops Get Away with Charging Such High Prices for a Sofa?

These retailers use a highly sophisticated method known in the industry as “hoping their customers don’t notice”. It really is that simple. Most shops that have an online presence will make sure that their prices are competitive, because they know that their customers might look them up. But for some retailers, particularly those who claim to focus primarily on their physical stores and not online sales, they rely heavily on their customers not checking the details. Don’t fall foul of one of these common tricks.

A Google Image search will work on any image, whether it’s posted on a website, promoted on Twitter or Facebook, or even Pinterest or Instagram, so it’s possible to check the real comparison price even for many “offline” companies. This technique works for any product, not just sofas, so no matter whether you're buying a sofa, a dining set or just some cushions - don’t forget to do your homework!

Searching through Google images can reveal more than just the prices, too. You might be surprised to find out just who is making your new furniture and what country it's coming from!  You can even use google image search to find images to use in your own blog or marketing, but do make sure you have permission to use any pictures you find. The copyright to these pictures is owned not by Google but by the photographer, so always ask first. For companies like us who take their own product photos a polite request will be greatly appreciated - it takes a lot of hard work to get a good picture!

 What have you found out while checking out price comparisons through Google image search? Drop a comment below and let us know!