Before starting her own software company, Kristen Stensby worked in her family’s flooring store in St. Louis as a commission-based RSA in charge of maintaining pricing—manually—for a 4,000-square-foot showroom. But given the frequency of price increases, Stensby simply couldn’t keep up. She decided to create Showroom Pricing, a software company that allows flooring dealers to update pricing in real time.
There are no apps to download or special scanners; customers merely walk into a retailer’s showroom and open the camera on their phones to see the pricing via QR code. “Retail prices are open for all customers to access, but we also allow for tiered pricing to be accessed by contractors and designers that work with the dealer,” Stensby told Floor Covering News.
What’s more, Showroom Pricing can be integrated into other back-end programs. “Our software integrates with both non-B2B price lists and B2B distributors,” Stensby added. “We also work with customers who are already happy with the pricing in their ERP systems like RollMaster, RFMS or QFloors.”
Beyond pricing a showroom, the company’s software helps dealers track samples as well as their most popular trending products.
Retailers rave
Showroom Pricing has received rave reviews from its retail customers who all agreed automated pricing saves considerable time and angst compared to the old ways of manually repricing a showroom. “Maintaining updated pricing in our showrooms has always been a massive undertaking, straining resources from multiple departments and presenting unforeseen challenges at seemingly always inopportune times,” said Kyal Wilson, president, Nampa Floors & Interiors, Nampa, Idaho. “Showroom Pricing offers a simple solution created by Kristen and her team. B2B pricing in our internal software automatically updates our showrooms when vendors send updated price lists. This feature is hands-down worth its weight in gold. Couple that with analytics gathered from sample usage and dealers can benefit in countless ways.”
From 2020 on, the number of price adjustments from manufacturers made it almost impossible to keep showroom pricing accurate at Sackett’s Flooring Solutions in Kalamazoo, Mich. That’s according to general manager Ryan Boender. “Prior to Showroom Pricing we would manually write out price tags and put them on our sample boards,” he said. “This task would typically take a person three to four weeks to reprice our entire showroom. Now, with Showroom Pricing, I can export our products from RFMS B2B and reprice our entire showroom in two different stores in a matter of 30 minutes.”
For Nick Frederick, owner of Frederick’s Floorcovering & Cabinetry, Parma, Ohio, repricing his showroom would take about 30 hours a week, which he agreed was untenable. As he explained, “This led us to making the decision just to pull all pricing from the showroom and work off a price list, which then evolved into manually checking the price of every product on the manufacturer website. We have a two-level showroom so the sales experience for my staff and our customers became tedious. We were constantly running up and down stairs and the customers were left standing around waiting—and, of course, when you’d come back with the pricing you just checked, the customer would be holding another sample and say, ‘Oh, I found this one, can you also get me a price on this?’” So, I started researching my options and came across Showroom Pricing.”
Frederick viewed Showroom Pricing’s videos, read its website and wrote down a list of concerns and questions he had for Stensby and her team. “I scheduled a web call demo and was very impressed with the system. They had an answer for every question that made sense and it was obvious the system was designed by someone that had flooring industry experience.”
Once the system is set up, repricing automatically occurs each time a price change is made. Retailers can also use it to change margins on a specific product.
