Today, I want to show you my favorite online shopping hack to find furniture and décor faster. It’s what I used to source over 3,000 items for my clients in just one year, without spending my whole life on the internet.
Open up Google, and let’s get started. Let’s say you’re looking for a red accent chair. We’re going to type in, “Red accent chair” as our search term. That’s what you want to type in the search bar first. Then hit space and type, “site:” and the URL of one of the stores you want to search. In this case, let’s say West Elm. We put, “site:westelm.com,” but we want to search more than one store, so we’re going to enter another space and put a capital “OR” and another space. Then you can type “site:” and the URL of the next store. You can keep doing that to add as many stores as you like. Your search string will look like this:
red accent chair site:westelm.com OR site:worldmarket.com OR site:pier1.com OR site:potterybarn.com
Once you’ve entered all the stores you want to search, then you simply hit Enter.
Now Google is doing all the work for us, looking for red chairs at West Elm, World Market, Pier One, and Pottery Barn. If you look at the text results (shown below), you’ll notice that the only results returned are for those four sites that we put in.
That is pretty cool in and of itself, but what makes this even more powerful is if you click the images tab. When you click the images tab, you can see all the red chairs at the four stores that we entered. You can scroll through them all and see all of the red chair options. You can also see that some are not red, but chances are, if you click through, there is a red fabric option. This is my favorite hack for making your online shopping for furniture and décor easier and faster.
One final tip. Once you have your favorite stores loaded into the search bar, I would copy and paste them into a document that you can use over and over again. You can also, once you have the search in the search bar, change your search terms. Instead of, “red accent chair,” maybe you want to run the search, “red dining chair.” You can change that and just hit Enter again, and it will search the same stores for your new search term.
Here’s how I recommend using this hack:
If you’re shopping for furniture, I would use this online shopping hack to narrow down your options. Find your top three pieces of furniture, and then only go to see those three pieces in person and make your final decision.
If you’re shopping for décor, I would use the online shopping hack to find the piece that you’re looking for. Verify the dimensions and order directly online, especially if they offer free shipping.
Click here to download 21 Favorite Places to Shop Online for Furniture and Décor to jump start your online shopping.
What a great tip!! Thank you so much for sharing!:-)
This totally up levels what I thought was a pretty efficient searching strategy. Thank you for sharing!
Jackie, this great I will be utilizing this tip often!!!!
Awesome tip Jackie thank you for sharing.
Way back b4 I started Design Lab I worked through MIP and wrote on my notes “she is brilliant!” You really are. This is sooo time saving. Thank you
Brilliant! Thank you :D
Such a neat way to find EXACTLY what you’re looking for online! This will definitely aid my online shopping habits, much to my husband’s dismay, lol. Thanks for the tip!
Brilliant tip, using it already!