Rare handmade oriental rugs – Interview with oriental-carpets.com

If you’re looking for a king size handmade oriental rug – this shop is the place to go. At oriental-carpets.com customers can choose from a variety of more than 10.000 different new and antique Oriental rugs that are located worldwide and that can be ordered without any further shipping costs in the European Union and the United States. Wholesalers as well as consumers use the shop’s large database to find the right rug or carpet.

Find out more about this interesting shop in the following interview with director Tony J. Namdar.

What is the idea behind your online store?
The idea is to create an online rug store which offers a huge choice by archiving the rugs and carpets of wholesalers worldwide into one database with user friendly access for everyone.

When did you start your online store?
The online store exists as the B2B version since 1997, as B2C since 2005.

I joined my father’s company in Hamburg/Germany after university. Hamburg and London are two of the main locations for Oriental carpet importers worldwide. Our main activity was to find the right carpets for retailers and wholesalers from overseas. Mainly this was done “in bulk” i.e. our customers were looking to buy several hundred square meters of oriental carpets and rugs each time. Often there were inquiries for certain oversized rugs – large than 3 x 4 meters – in certain colors from certain provenances etc. Eventually, I made it my mission to archive these rare rugs in an in-house database, in order to offer them to our clients quickly without having to search for them. This database has grown rapidly and was made available online. Initially only for retail customers, then increasingly for private use. The database was later expanded to include all types of carpets.

In this way we provide carpets directly from the importer to private customers at low prices and the customers can subsequently browse the stock of thousands of wholesalers worldwide.

How important is the UK and the international market for you?
Since the business started off in Germany, our main clientele is still there. However since opening our office in London our business within the UK has grown rapidly. The USA is an important market for us as well because we have the world’s largest choice of large and oversized oriental rugs and the USA are the biggest market for large rugs.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
We had it custom made for our purposes. It was not possible to “weave” the special characteristics and categories of rugs into a standard shop system.

Which payment systems does your shop offer?
We currently accept credit card payment for MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club. We are planning to accept American Express, PayPal and direct debit.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
The first and most important advantage is the unbeatable choice. With a powerful online database browsing the products and finding the right carpet is much quicker and easier than finding a rug in any high street store. Lastly we can offer lower prices by not having to keep a stock of thousands of rugs, all made possible by the world wide web.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
The sheer number of criteria by which rugs can be searched on our website is the main functional advantage we have over our competitors. You will not find another website that covers all of these criteria including whether the carpet should have an allover design or a medallion, whether it should have a Mahi or Bukhara design, whether it should be new or antique (down to 20 years accuracy). All this is made possible by a sophisticated database, and the meticulous categorization of each rug.

Which special services do you offer?
Each rug is described in detail including the history of each rug origin/provenance and its special characteristics. We try to describe each rug and its condition (in case of used antique rugs) as honestly as possible.

For special requests, we also offer a comprehensive service. We are often asked whether we can make an assessment of the value for money performance of certain carpets. We do this gladly and objectively. One important reason being that due to our business concept of not having our own stock we are objective and not under any pressure to sell specific rugs which have been in stock for a longer time because wholesalers keep the stock for us. Nor are we motivated to sell rugs with a lower purchase price and therefore higher profit because our markup percentage is the same with each carpet. Therefore truly objective advice and guidance is possible, by the nature of our business in a way.

Customer phone service goes far beyond normal business hours, simply because our phone system automatically transfers calls to the mobile phones of our employees who can access all carpet data via a special technique on their mobile phones. E-Mails are answered within 20 minutes, mostly quicker, also beyond normal business hours (the Blackberry makes it happen).

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
First and foremost becoming a member of Trusted Shops was an important measure which is basically like the MOT for online shops. Another very important step was to grant our customers free shipping within the entire European Union and within the USA. Lastly our customers have full right of return without any shipping costs involved.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
Find a niche of difficult to find products and invest in usability of your website and in good customer service.

What are your plans for the future?
I am currently working on a completely new design of our website under a new domain which covers modern rugs as well as oriental rugs.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
That is easy, amazon.co.uk. They are always my first stop when I want to buy something online.

To find out more about this shop go to oriental-carpets.com or have a look at the shop’s profile at Trusted Shops.