Choosing a Warehouse Furniture Cart: 3 Features to Look For

Online sales made up nearly 20% of furniture purchases in 2022. That may not sound like much, but in a more-than-$10-billion-per-year business, it represents a lot of chairs, tables, and armoires.

Furniture presents unique material handling challenges. It’s often bulky. Sometimes it’s fragile. At a high-throughput distribution center, with lots of SKUs, it’s hard to find a single piece of material handling equipment that can handle multiple items. 

That said, professional-grade furniture carts do share some features. Here are key characteristics to consider when purchasing warehouse furniture carts for your operation.  

Explore Industrial Carts from BHS, Inc. 

Durable Warehouse Furniture Carts Provide a Better ROI 

The average loveseat weighs over 200 pounds. A four-seat sectional sofa, meanwhile, can easily weigh over 1,000 pounds. No simple hand truck will stand up to that kind of load, shift after shift. 

Regardless of the items that pass through your warehouse, it’s essential to find carts with sufficient carrying capacity and general toughness. Generally, furniture carts with carrying capacities of 2,000 pounds and higher can handle the workload. 

When in doubt, look for welded steel construction and a powder-coat finish. Don’t neglect the wheel assemblies, a common point of failure for lighter-duty carts; look for industrial-strength phenolic casters. 

Learn about high-capacity Platform Trucks from BHS, Inc. 

Look for Carts with a Minimal Footprint (and Maximum Maneuverability)

In a busy furniture warehouse, you don’t have time to struggle with steering. Lower-quality furniture carts end up with stuck caster swivels or sticky wheels, cutting down on order-filling efficiency and placing greater ergonomic strain on workers. 

Flatbed Cart	Flat Deck Carts

There are a few solutions to the maneuverability challenge: 

• A combination of swiveling and fixed casters supports straight tracking and cuts tight corners at once. In a four-wheel furniture cart, make sure two casters swivel, while the other two remain fixed. 

Learn about Flat Deck Carts from BHS, Inc. 

• Center-steer mechanisms create an even better turning radius. A six-wheel configuration might feature four six-inch (15.24-centimeter) casters at the corners, plus two eight-inch (20.32-centimeter) casters in the center. That allows the entire unit to rotate around the central turning point, for much tighter turns. 

See center-steer Flatbed Carts from BHS, Inc. 

• Fork pockets allow you to move the whole load — cart and all — via lift truck. 

Between uses, you need to store your carts without taking up too much space. If throughput varies widely at your facility, it’s a good idea to choose carts designed to stack safely on one another. This allows you to store multiple units within a single compact footprint.  

Try flat Stacking Carts from BHS, Inc. 

Customized Furniture Carts Can Handle Case-Specific Applications

Not all facilities will require custom furniture carts — but in some situations, customization can allow for improved throughput, better ergonomics, and a greater degree of versatility. 

At BHS, we work with every client to match the equipment to the job at hand. Whether we’re modifying a existing furniture cart or creating a from-scratch design, we’re able to produce solutions that meet a wide range of material handling challenges:

• Modular solutions for tugger trains and similar systems.
• Nested carts that can handle multiple fragile products per load while protecting against damage.
• Carts built with stainless steel for food and pharmaceutical applications.
• Equipment with custom powder-coating and laser etching to match your business’s brand. 

To explore options — or to discuss your idea with a member of our sales team — call 1.800.247.9500 or fill out our online form.