Why do high street retailers in the UK not have a near monopoly of the bean bags market when it is a product that is usually chosen on a mixture of attributes like colour, feel and shape; all things that are difficult to convey on a website. The simple answer is probably size, as retailers are not prepared to stock the kind of beanbag range that would get consumers more interested and consumers would rather have it delivered to their door.

Of course, part of the reason for this is that the approach of most UK high street retailers is to either stock a few cheap bean bags as an impulse purchase or, at the other end of the scale, to stock a couple of designer bean bags that cost as much as a decent piece of furniture. Thankfully, over the past 5 years, a number of significant beanbag designers and manufacturers have established sizeable online businesses that offer an extensive range of bean-filled products. Probably the most significant of these is BeanBagBazaar.

If the high street has capitulated on bean bags and made online shopping the obvious choice, it leaves the consumer with a bit of a puzzle. How do you remotely choose a product where the buying decision relies so much on judgements regarding colour, shape, finishing and the like? Well, we have to dig underneath the initial offers, prices and images to get to the nitty-gritty details and here are some of the things to look out for when buying bean bags online.

Bean bags can be deceptively similar when viewed on a website. Indeed, most will use fabrics that appear to be almost identical, but one of the first things to look at is whether they are FR rated, a legal requirement that means that the bean bag fabric has passed fire resistance tests. Rather surprisingly, this is sometimes not the case. Another key feature is the quality, and therefore cost, of the stitching. If the external seams have been top stitched whilst the internal seams are overlocked, the beanbag will much more robust and, as importantly, the seams will look better.

Quite a few bean bag suppliers rely on liners inside their bean bags to prevent leakage of the filler beans. At first, this seems like an eminently sensible idea, until you realise that it actually prevents the free movement of the polystyrene beads inside the bean bag, leading to rucking and difficulty in getting a good shape to the bag.

Some of the other things to consider, that are really dependent on the type of bean bag you are looking for are azo-free dyes on products for young children, of which the Bambeano is a superb example and wipe clean and stain resistant coatings on outdoor beanbags like the kids Baz Bag.

To summarise, there are always risks in buying something online that relies on colour, size and invisible qualities, so make sure that the product features are clear, that the images communicate the product effectively and that the company has an obvious returns policy and good customer reviews. That way, you should end up with a bean bag that is much better than anything you can buy on the high street.

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