How much of your business is trade? Measuring designer share

Ask a room of showroom owners how much business comes from designers and the answers will sound remarkably certain. Ask whether those answers include a homeowner sent in by a designer, and the certainty begins to loosen.

You can count your own trade share. First define the relationship, then label the orders, and use the same sales basis every month. The useful result is a number that helps you staff the trade desk and fund your designer program, with enough detail to explain a change.

Decide what counts as trade

A trade purchase is an order bought by a business under your trade arrangement. A trade-influenced retail sale is an order bought by the homeowner after a designer’s introduction. Both matter, but they answer different questions.

A trade tier on the customer record identifies the commercial relationship. A resale certificate is supporting tax documentation; it should not become your sole definition of whether a customer belongs to the trade program. A designer can make a taxable purchase, and a tax exemption does not describe the service your trade desk provides.

Use separate order labels for trade purchases and designer referrals. If you also report a combined designer-related total, count each order once. Write your classification rule down so an associate covering a shift can apply it without consulting the person who remembers every project.

Make tagging part of opening the quote

Assign responsibility for classification when the quote is created. The associate records the customer’s trade status and tags the order. Before closing the month, the trade-desk lead reviews missing or conflicting labels.

Keep the vocabulary short. For example, use Trade purchase and Designer referral as distinct order tags, with the designer identity recorded in a field. Avoid a different spelling for each associate. A report cannot know that Trade, trade client, and “designer, probably” were meant to describe the same thing.

Customer status and order status serve different purposes. A household can buy directly today after a referred project last year. Preserve the relationship on the customer record, but classify the new transaction from what actually happened.

Calculate share and average ticket on the same basis

Choose a consistent period and sales basis before opening the spreadsheet. For an operating review, net merchandise after discounts and returns is a useful starting point. Keep tax and delivery outside this comparison, and use the same treatment for trade and retail.

Here is an illustrative monthly worksheet:

In this example, designer referrals remain within other retail and receive a separate subtotal. Moving those sales into trade would change the meaning of the first measure. Either definition can be useful, provided you label it and keep it stable.

Choose whether the review follows placed or delivered sales. Do not put written trade orders over delivered store revenue. Treat a partial delivery according to that chosen basis, and exclude deposit orders from merchandise order counts so a payment does not become another furniture sale.

Define repeat rate before calling it retention

A practical monthly repeat measure is the share of purchasing trade accounts that had bought before that month. Count businesses, not contact names, and use a consistent account identifier.

Say 15 trade accounts purchased this month and 10 had a previous purchase. The monthly repeat-buyer share is 10 ÷ 15, or 66.7%. This is not the percentage of all past designers retained: the denominator contains only accounts buying this month.

Also look at a longer period suited to project cycles. A studio may be working on a room for months before placing another order. An account that skips a month is not automatically lost.

Use OrderPilot to make the split traceable

OrderPilot provides the records for this method rather than a ready-made trade-versus-retail report. On Growth and Professional, customer fields can hold a trade tier and display useful customer details; customer tags help identify accounts, while the customer list shows amount spent. Order tags sync with Shopify and filter the Quotes and Orders lists. Their status counts help the team review the tagged work. Use order tags and filters consistently before trying to interpret the totals. Build the worksheet from order-level exports carrying the fields you need, joining customer classifications by account identifier where necessary. Review the Sales performance report for quotes, orders, revenue, average order, and salesperson CSV data. A dedicated trade salesperson can provide a useful cross-check, but salesperson totals are not proof that every sale was trade.

Let your own trend guide the investment

There is no universal trade-share target in the evidence behind this guide. Business of Home’s reporting on changing furniture retail describes the growing importance of designer relationships; it does not establish a revenue mix every store should pursue.

Review the worksheet monthly, alongside margin, workload, and dependence on particular accounts. Growing trade sales may justify better sample support or dedicated desk coverage. Falling share may simply mean retail grew faster. Ask what changed before changing the program.

Bring the result into the owner’s regular business review, with the definitions attached. A smaller number you can explain is more useful than an impressive guess.

Sources

1. Are furniture stores dying, or just changing? — Business of Home, March 20, 2024.