DO NOT BUY FROM FLORIDA HILL NURSERY. I ordered 10 blackberry plants from them, 8 of which arrived virtually dead. Their refund policy on their website says, and I quote "Sometimes plants don’t survive and we here at Florida Hill Nursery understand that. If within a 30-day time period from the point of delivery your plants don’t survive use our contact form to get in touch with us*.For a full refund return the plants to the address listed below. Once the plants have been shipped back to us simply use our contact form to send us the delivery confirmation. Return the plants to:FHN Refund Department P.O. Box 530318 Debary, FL 32753* " I tried contacting them multiple timess via their contact page, email, and phone. They are completely unresponsive. A very bad experience, and loss of about $70.00.

I would like to know some advise for buying furniture directly from overseas? Happy to provide my opinions. 1.How much do you need to pay for the custom stuff for 20' container in your country? Not sure what you're asking. You can name your price depending on the quality and complication you will settle for. All Asian furniture bought directly from the Asian factory is paid for before it leaves the factory. 20' container is small. You will have problems with a factory that doesn't think you can do enough business. 2.What kind of after-sales service do you usually get if you buy from your country. In the U.S. and Canada we expect proper service and resolution to reasonable problems. If necessary we can go to court. Of course in Asia that is not realistic. 3.What is the rate of the tax? Don't know what the import duties are, however, for bedroom furniture it can be quite high unless you protest and win. 4.Wooden furniture would need to be disinfected, so how much would you need to pay? The wood needs to be treated first before anything else is done to it. Once the furniture is made its too late to treat the wood. I know of several companies who lost a lot of money because their Asian factory skipped this step to save a few pennies. 5.Besides custom staff, tax, what else do you need to pay for importing furniture? If yes, how much for each items? You probably need to hire quality control inspectors to regularly monitor the factory. You need to spend money on catalogs and trade shows to promote your products to store buyers. Plan on frequent travel within the US as well to make additional visits to store buyers. Some furniture will arrive damaged or with missing parts. You will need to maintain a warehouse for replacement parts or your dealers will make deductions from future payments to cover the costs of repairs and missing parts. 6.Would you like to try to buy directly from overseas, why or why not? No way. Unless you can do a lot of volume, you will eventually lose all your money. Thanks so much for your kind attention and comments. I take pleasure to lend an attentive ear to your idea or suggestions for the points mentioned above, as I plan to retail furniture to overseas. I would like to see wheather it will work or not. Thanks. You have many competitors now, and the retail furniture sector is in a major recession. In fact, I would call it a depression. My advice would be to attend the international furniture trade show in Las Vegas in January and see what your competitors are offering. There are many business opportunities for an Asian entrepreneur in this economy. Furniture is probably the worst. Why would you choose furniture?

I purchased Alder & Tweed "leather" dining room chairs 2 years ago, and this is what they look like today. I emailed the company, and they gave me an explanation of why this happened (exposure to sunlight & use of leather cleaner). We have never used leather cleaner, but the room does have windows. They said that they could not do anything. I paid $299 apiece for 8 chairs so I guess I'm out of $2,392. Apparently, this is not an isolated situation for this company.

We did a DIY purchase-and-install of approx 800sqft of engineered Brazilian Cherry from Lumber Liquidators about a year ago (I think this is it). We have a LL under 45 minutes away, so we loaded up the pickup. It was all instock*, so we walked out the door with it the day we bought it. (There were samples that came home first, obviously!) Exception was two pieces of stairnose that we needed: those had to be ordered, and there was definitely a longer delay in getting those than I thought reasonable. Questions about how easy/difficult things are to install is going to vary by brand and what material it is. Solid hardwood will have more variations than, say, engineered. I don't think we had ANY pieces that were unusable due to poor quality (curves, bends, breaks in tongue/groove, surface marring, etc). The boxes looked pretty chintzy/cheap, but the product itself was beautiful. No kids, but three cats and ongoing construction (heh), and it only has a few marks - mostly from extreme circumstances (let's just say my husband is sometimes careless about where he THROWS a hammer. ahem.) Anyway. The actual installation is pretty straightforward, though the details again vary by what product. We rented a compressor and nail gun, because we did the nail/staple installation. We took turns being the "nailer" and the "feeder" - the "feeder" was responsible for mixing lengths of pieces, intermixing boxes, cutting end pieces to length, etc. It took us close to three full (12 hour) days to get it all down - again, 800sqft in four bedrooms and weird shaped hallway, and we had to shift furniture from room to room - so a living room should be a one-day project. There is some good information online, as far as installation instructions/tips/etc - including the LL website. It really only takes some basic carpentry skills (cutting to length, nailing neatly), and some forethought (which way should it run, marking parallel lines occasionally, etc).