We supply garden furniture, sofas, mattresses and Christmas to retailers who sell them on their own websites. This is the advice we give our own partners, in full, before they have spent a penny with us.
We will be straight with you, because you will work it out anyway.
When you open a trade account you get a file. In that file is every product we stock, with our photographs, our descriptions, our dimensions and our prices. You can have it on your website in an afternoon. So can the partner who signed up the same morning, and the one who signs up next March.
If all three of you leave it exactly as it arrived, you have built the same shop three times. Same pictures, same words, same products. At that point there is only one thing left for a customer to choose on, and it is price. You will all find out together how low that goes.
The partners who do well with us are not the ones with the biggest budget. They are the ones who treated the feed as a starting point rather than a finished shop. Here is what they actually do.
The one thing you must never change
Your SKU.
Every product we supply has a code like LW-00123. That code is how our stock feed finds the product in your shop, how your order reaches the right item in our warehouse, and how we work out what went wrong when something does.
Change the product name — please do. Change the photographs, the description, the category, the price. Change the barcode if you have your own. Do not touch the SKU, and keep it in the SKU field where your stock sync is looking for it. If you want your own internal reference as well, most platforms have a second field for it.
Your photographs
This is the biggest single difference between a partner who sells and a partner who does not, and it is the one most people skip.
Our product shots are good. They are also on a few hundred other websites, and a customer who has opened four tabs can see that immediately. Identical images tell them they are looking at four middlemen, and that the only sensible thing to do is sort by price.
Start with your own photography on your best lines
You do not need a studio. A clear day, a decent phone, a real garden and your three or four best sellers will out-perform anything else on your site. One good photograph of a dining set in an actual British back garden beats a flawless cut-out on white, because the customer can see themselves in it.
Use AI for the rest
This is where the effort pays off at scale. Take our product image as the base and have an AI tool place it into a setting — a patio at golden hour, a decked terrace, a courtyard with the right planting. You can produce a consistent, branded set across a whole range in a day, in a look that is yours and nobody else's.
That is not just good manners. Since April 2025 the UK's unfair trading rules sit in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and the CMA can now fine a business directly — up to 10% of worldwide turnover — for misleading customers about what they are buying, without going to court first. An AI image that flatters is fine. An AI image that shows something you cannot ship is a misleading action, and it is your name on the invoice, not ours.
A simple test: if the parcel arrived and the customer held your photograph next to it, would they feel misled? If not, you are fine.
Your words
Our descriptions exist so you have something to launch with. They are not meant to be your final copy. Copy them verbatim and you have given Google nothing — the same paragraph on thirty sites means Google picks one of those sites to show, and there is no particular reason for it to be yours.
- Rewrite the title. Ours is descriptive. Yours should be the thing your customer actually types. "6 Seat Rattan Dining Set" is what we call it; "Grey Rattan Garden Dining Set — Seats 6, Rain Cover Included" is what somebody searches for.
- Rewrite the first paragraph at minimum. If you do nothing else, do this. It is what appears in search results and it is the only bit most people read.
- Add what we cannot know. How it looks in a small garden. Whether it will fit through a standard side gate. What to do with it in winter. Who it suits and who it does not. That is the part no feed can give you and no competitor can copy, and it is the part that turns a browser into an order.
- Keep the specifications exact. Dimensions, weights and materials come from us and they are right. Do not paraphrase those.
Thirty minutes per product sounds like a lot until you do it to your twenty best sellers and watch what happens to them.
Your barcodes
This one is more technical, and most partners never get to it. The ones who do are usually the ones spending money on Google Shopping, where it matters a great deal.
Google Shopping uses the barcode, the GTIN, to decide that two listings are the same product. When they are the same product, Google can show them side by side and sort by price. If you are the fourth cheapest you may as well not be there. Your own barcode makes your listing your own product, judged on its own merits.
If you want your own
Barcodes come from GS1, and only from GS1 — resold or recycled numbers cause problems later, and Google explicitly tells you not to invent them. GS1 UK charges by your turnover:
| Your annual turnover | Yearly fee | Barcodes included |
|---|---|---|
| Under £100,000 | £50 | 10 |
| £100,000 – £499,999 | £100 | 100 |
| £500,000 – £999,999 | £130 | 1,000 |
Note the allowances. At the lower tiers you get ten or a hundred numbers, not five hundred. So do not plan on rebranding the whole catalogue — pick the lines you genuinely sell, the ones you have photographed and written up properly, and do those. That is the right order anyway.
The honest caveat: GS1's rule is that the brand owner assigns the barcode. If you are reselling a product as ours, it is not yours to number. If you are genuinely presenting it as your own brand — your name, your images, your product identity, and you are the one the customer holds responsible — then you are the brand owner for that purpose and the number is properly yours. Most of our range carries no manufacturer branding, which is exactly why this works. If you are not sure which side of the line you are on, ask us.
If you do not want the expense yet
Do not leave the identifier fields blank and do not make something up. Put your own brand name in the brand field and your SKU in the MPN field. Google accepts that combination for products without a manufacturer barcode, and it is far better than nothing.
The part nobody finds interesting
Everything above is about not looking like everyone else. This part is about converting the traffic once it arrives, and it is duller and more valuable.
- Say when it will arrive, on the product page. Not "fast delivery". A date. It is the single most common reason a full basket gets abandoned.
- Keep your stock honest. Set your sync up properly, check it occasionally, and do not sell what we have not got. One cancelled order costs more than the margin on the next five.
- Ask for reviews, every time. Automate the email. Furniture is a considered purchase and people read reviews before they spend four hundred pounds.
- Sell sets and combinations. A dining set, cover and cushion pack as one offer is a bigger order, a better margin, and something nobody else's feed is doing for them.
- Answer the phone. You are competing against businesses that cannot be reached. That is a genuine advantage and it costs nothing.
Where to start
Do not try to do all of this. Do it in this order.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Week one | Import the feed as it comes and get the stock sync working. Get the shop live and earning. Perfection later. |
| Week two | Pick your twenty best sellers — you will know which within a fortnight. Rewrite their titles and first paragraphs. Nothing else. |
| Month two | Photograph or AI-restyle those same twenty. Add the delivery dates. Switch on review requests. |
| When it is working | GS1 account, your own barcodes on the lines you actually sell, then start again at the next twenty products. |
Where we come into it
None of the above needs us specifically. It is true of any supplier you work with, and you are welcome to take it and use it somewhere else.
What we do is make the mechanical parts take an afternoon instead of a fortnight: a feed written in your platform's own format, a free plugin that keeps your stock honest, a catalogue with the barcodes deliberately stripped out so you are not competing against forty other listings on the same number, and a phone that gets answered by somebody who has handled the product.