Nearly There: Our Online Shop Is About to Open Its Doors

I have been building the Deskwell shop for months, and for most of that time only the five of us could see it. That changes soon. Our office furniture online shop for UK businesses is nearly ready, and the door is already ajar if you want a look before we put the sign up.

Here is what is there, what is still on the bench, and why it has taken this long.

What is live in the office furniture shop now

Most of it, as it happens.

Hundreds of products are listed across chairs, desks, storage, tables and the accessories that make an office work. They are not placeholders. Each one carries its full specification, which was the whole reason for building the shop ourselves. If a chair has a weight rating, it is on the page. If a desk comes in five widths and three finishes, you pick them on one page, and the price, the photograph and the dimensions change as you go.

What you will find on every page:

• One price. The same number for one chair or forty, shown ex VAT, and no "was" price that nobody ever paid.

• The specs. Dimensions, seat heights, guarantees and fabric details, printed rather than hinted at.

• On a growing number of products, a 3D view you can turn round to see the back, the feet and the cable ports before anything arrives.

The search knows about furniture too. Type "1600 white bench desk" and it reads a width, a finish and a type of desk, where a generic search box sees three loose words.

If you want somewhere to start, I would point you at the office chairs and office desks departments first.

What is still on the bench

Plenty, and I would rather say so now than pretend otherwise.

More 3D models are on the way. Desks are furthest along. Chairs take longer, because a chair has more moving parts and every one of them has to sit in the right place. Customer reviews will follow once there are customers to write them, which seems fair. The catalogue will keep growing as we add ranges, so the shop you see this month will not be the shop you see at Christmas.

There will be bugs. There always are. I would much rather hear about one from you than find it at ten at night, so if something looks wrong, tell us. Nobody will tell you it is a feature.

Why it took this long

Because the quick version would have been worse.

Office furniture is awkward to sell online. One bookcase can be dozens of real product codes once you count the heights, finishes and doors, and each code has its own price and photograph. A rented shop platform would have had us squashing all of that into a handful of listings, or quietly dropping the awkward ones. We wanted every option on the page with the right price against it, and that meant building it.

It also meant checking it. Before anything goes live I want to know the price on the page matches the price at the checkout, the dimensions match the supplier's sheet, and the page loads quickly on a phone with one bar of signal in a car park.

Have a nose around

You do not need to wait for an announcement. The Deskwell shop is there now. Browse it, compare things, and tell us what is missing.

To see what one listing can do, try the Oslo back to back bench desk. It comes in two, four and six person sizes and several finishes, all on one page. If you are working to a budget, the office desks between £250 and £500 are a sensible place to begin.

We will say so properly when the doors are fully open. Until then, the lights are on and the kettle has boiled.