Cfc Furniture Business Plan

...

We will start our business among Universities in Washington D.C. and then expand our business to nearby residents and other regions step by step. It is possible we will expand our business to other second handed items other than furniture in the future. The community is based on geographical position at first, we plan to build community based on interest someday.

- Trading platform

The platform earns fees for services that may include listing the furniture, successfully selling it, and facilitating payment. We charge 5% of the total deal amount, which is relatively low. We hope the low price can attract more customers for us in the first place.

To help reduce default risk, we require a real name system when the users sign up to the website. The personal information can also help us learn about consumption level and habit, but we would never surrender any personal information. The information will not be listed on the website. When buyers find ideal items, they can make contact with sellers and make transaction personally to avoid the transaction fees, but they will face default risk. With the real name system, we can guarantee successful transactions as long as they make transactions through the platform and pay the transaction fees.

- Information retrieval

Users can freely post their items on the website (after they sign in to our real name platform) and will not be charged any fees unless a transaction is successfully made. We will try to divide the items into different categories to help buyers find the ideal items more easily. Also, the items will be divided on the basis of geographical position to increase the turnover rate.

If a seller wants his item to be easier to find and sell, he can pay service fees to put his item on the top of the category. We charge a minimum 3% of the price of the item. The higher fees in absolute terms you pay, the better position you get for your item.

III. Organizational Structure

We use a functional organization to arrange our organizational structure by department: marketing, sales and finance. A functional organizational structure works well when small companies are heavily project-focused. We will have a director, two managers and two analysts in each of the department. The director is likely to report to the Chief Executive Officer, and both managers would report to the director. In addition, each manager may have an analyst reporting to them. Directors can assign certain projects to senior managers, who can then divvy up tasks with their assistant. The department can then more effectively meet their project deadlines.

- Marketing department

This department consists of one director, three managers and three assistants. Each of the managers may have one assistant. One manager is responsible for the communications. He should plan advertising campaigns, develop e-mail marketing programs, create promotional content for the company website, write press releases or product publications, such as product leaflets, company brochures, product data sheets or customer newsletters. One is responsible for sales support. Cooperation between the sales and marketing departments can improve sales performance and speed up business growth. The marketing department can provide sales teams with high-quality leads by running advertisements that include a reply mechanism, such as a coupon or telephone number, or by encouraging visitors to the company website to register their details in return for a free newsletter or special report. Marketing also prepares presentations for the sales team and supplies them with stocks of promotional material to give to customers and prospects. One is responsible for product development: doing research and understanding customer’s need and preference. He sets the price and prepares plan to launch the product.

- Sales department

This department consists of two managers and each of them has an assistant. One is focusing on setting up targets and Identifying and contacting prospects. One is responsible for coordinating its efforts to dovetail with those of the marketing department and putting efforts with other departments for recovery of money from customer in exceptional cases.

- Finance department

This department consists of two managers. One is responsible for corporate development and corporate strategy. This area includes sourcing and analyzing mergers and acquisitions deals, raising debt and equity financing, making capital structure decisions. Managers should provide insight into high level strategic decisions. One manager should focus on risk management, valuing leverage. He should consider some key risk factors, such as: currency, interest rate, market, operational, legal and try to quantify the possible impacts so that they can be mitigated as much as possible.

IV. Market place positioning

- Competitive Analysis

Economical Motivations

Second-hand furniture is regarded by many people as undesirable commodity that only poor people consume. Traditionally, using relatively low cost second-hand furniture was a way to save money, accommodating the economic constraints imposed by a lack of resources.

Purchasing second-hand furniture is a conflict-avoidance strategy for low-income consumers who would like to alleviate the burden of poverty. Poverty is one of the motivations for second hand furniture shopping. Most of these consumers are thought of price conscious which means they focus exclusively on paying low prices. They are concerned about the price paid relative to quality received.

Guiot and Roux (2010) pointed out the importance of economic motivations in second-hand furniture shopping. The consumers would like to spend less by searching for a fair price, hunting for bargains. Therefore, since second-hand goods are generally cheaper than new ones, indirect price discrimination between used and new goods encourages consumers to buy second-hand products with price advantages (Anderson & Ginsburgh, 1994).

Motivations of Environment

Second-hand furniture trades constitute part of ethical consumerism who attempt to minimize harmful effects to the environment and society by reducing furniture disposal. Second-hand furniture trading is one of the strategies to reduce waste. Because of the growing demand for environmentally-responsible furniture consumption, purchasing