Order, wait, deliver, assemble, then judge
Most categories have two events: it ships, it arrives. Furniture has four, and the last one is the only one that matters.
A sofa ordered in March may be delivered in April. A flat-pack sideboard delivered on Saturday may not be built until the following weekend. Until it is assembled and in the room, the buyer has an opinion about a cardboard box.
This is the category where asking on delivery is most obviously wrong, and where the gap between "technically delivered" and "actually able to review" is widest. The delay after delivery has to be generous — generous enough to feel almost too long — because the alternative is a review of the packaging.
Photographs are the whole game in decor
Furniture and decor reviews carry disproportionate weight when they include a photo, and buyers in this category take photos more readily than in any other. They have just finished a room and they are pleased with it.
A listing with six buyer photographs of the piece in real homes, in real light, next to real walls, sells against a listing with studio photography alone and no contest. Nobody believes the studio shot — everybody believes the slightly badly lit photo of it in someone's actual living room.
Asking at the right moment is what produces those. A buyer asked a week after assembly, while the room still feels new, is a buyer who will attach a picture. A buyer asked three months later will not.
Damage in transit is the risk you have to design around
Large furniture is the category most likely to arrive damaged, and a request that lands on a buyer staring at a chipped corner is worse than no request. Merita excludes orders carrying a complaint, a refund or an open return before anything is sent — which in furniture is not an edge case but a routine and necessary filter.
What Merita does
We time the request from delivery with a delay long enough for the piece to have been assembled and lived with, send one message in the buyer's language through the marketplace's own buyer messaging, and exclude anything with a complaint or return attached. One message per order, nothing offered in return.