At Church Furniture Partner, we have effectively positioned ourselves to provide churches with the lowest possible prices on almost every possible item of church furniture.  The purpose of this article is not to explain how we are able to accomplish this, nor is it to convince you we actually are able to achieve what we claim.  Rather our desire is to share a real life church purchasing story and discuss the somewhats “questionable” practice of low price guarantees.  Here’s how the story begins to unfold.

A few weeks ago a pastor getting ready to start a new church contacted us regarding church seating.  We actually had worked with him at his former church and had been privileged to provide him 550 worship chairs for that ministry.  Now he needed 450 chairs for his new church launch scheduled for February, 2012.  We were thrilled be contacted us because we already had an established relationship.  We went to work on his behalf.  And this past week he ordered those 450 chairs from Church Furniture Partner for $37.35 each delivered.

He wrote us the following words as he placed his order, “I cannot thank you enough for all you have done and continue to do through Church Furniture Partner. It is always a pleasure working with you!  Again, thanks for all your help in making this happen and I look forward to working with you more in the future.”  Those type of words are always valued by us.  And in other conversation with him, he shared how pleased he was with the price we had been able to provide his new work.

Out of curiosity we decided to check online pricing on this order from some of the church furnishing dealers we are most familiar with and who state they will be undersold and who also offer some sort of “low-price guarantee”.  We discovered one of the most prominent dealers had the same chair listed, the same options available, and also shipping costs calculated through an online system.  What was the result?  The identical chair we provided this pastor would have cost his new church $50.05 a chair from this dealer with the “low-price guarantee”!  That’s an overall savings of $6,210 our initial Church Furniture Partner quote provided versus the online price from this dealer with the “low-price guarantee”!

Here are a few thoughts:

• It is certainly likely that if our pastor friend had called this online dealer he might have received a better quote than their online pricing.  We don’t know that with certitude, but the very high cost of shipping the online calculator generated was more than twice our shipping costs.
• It is also possible the online dealer would have attempted to beat our price to our pastor friend.  Since we know how low our price was, we imagine they would not have enjoyed doing so.  However, since their profit margin is so significant if a church accepts their online price, they can certainly “afford” to do so.
• Our final thought though is that we question any dealer NOT providing the church their BEST price FIRST!  Proclaiming that one will not be “undersold” when one’s initial pricing has so much room to be lowered is a choice that we are not comfortable with at Church Furniture Partner.  We are committed to giving you our lowest price at the outset, not through negotiations.

Please know our purpose is not to criticize other church furniture dealers.  Rather it is to save your church money!  If your church needs to make any church furniture purchase, please put us to the test and see for yourself.  You can contact us here!  We’d love to help your church save money!