Why Three Seats?


As long-time Best Home Furnishings dealers, many of you are acclimated to our familiar prompt to enter a minimum of three seats for any single order. Whether it’s three chairs, three recliners, a sofa, a loveseat and a chair, or a slight modification of “three”(two chairs and two ottomans) entering three will ensure that you pay the lowest possible shipping cost per seat on a small order.

Best’s pre-paid freight program is designed to accommodate a variety of order sizes
without penalizing a dealer on those occasions when you just need several pieces. We can’t overcome the reality of today’s transit logistics, which we all know provides for cheaper individual freight costs on larger shipments. But our pre-paid program freight charts, available to any dealer any time, are carefully calculated to spread as much savings as possible from one shipment volume to the next. Is shipping three seats more expensive per piece – or per seat – than say 25 seats? Absolutely. But when you realize you can ship three seats for approximately the same dollar cost as only one, it really begins to make sense.

Beyond this minimum, the freight charts are designed to reduce costs at five seats, ten seats, 25 seats, 50 seats and for truckloads which is considered 150 seats +. The program goes beyond focusing on simply cost however. Best is pre-paying these shipping charges to our contract carrier partners for you, and then billing you on one invoice for goods and freight. We write into the contracts with our carriers a maximum number of days to deliver our furniture – on average. We don’t like that it takes longer to ship our goods to the Southwest and most regions of the US than it does for us to build them from scratch. We insist on clean trailers that are used for non-toxic, dry goods only and we insist that the driver “tailgate” the cartons, helping everyone speed up deliveries.

Regrettably, as the trucking industry struggles with a shortage of drivers, creating longer transit times and pushing shipping expenses up, we will see increased costs. But we have some very established and experienced people in our shipping department who have historically come up with creative ways to mitigate transit cost increases.

Don’t have one of our current shipping cost charts? Shoot us an email and we’ll forward one to you with clear instructions on how to read it and calculate EXACT cost on any shipment.

Dan&Nate

*UPDATE*

As we informed you via email, our primary LTL carrier for shipments into the Southwest, Styline Logistics has informed us that they intend to open a distribution center in the state of Arizona by the end of 2019. We don’t have any more details at this point, but regardless of its exact location, we’re confident that all our dealers in the Southwest will benefit from a more direct distribution route from Indiana to Arizona.

Us