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I'd try before you buy.

If the piece is a mainly decorative piece of furniture (e.g. corner chair that mostly acts as a bag & jacket holder, only gets sat in a couple times a month when guests comes over), buying w/o trying could work out. However, if it's a piece of furniture that gets used a lot, I wouldn't buy w/o a test drive.

I'm pretty picky though b/c I have short legs and seat depth makes a huge difference to me. If your mother can't physically go around and she plans on sitting in this chair, I wouldn't get one w/o trying. It might turn out that she would have a lot of problems getting in/out of the chair!

This is another question we dealt with last week...

I think asking your friends to try out a sofa is strange... What are you going to do if you go ahead and order it but later hate it? Especially with your friends all excitedly checking back with you about "how do you like it??"

If I have 2 choices for sofa: one I can try on myself and liked it, another is that crazy "look so comfortable" piece online, I'd buy the one I physically tried on. Because sofa is probably THE furniture you spent most of the time on; you got to be very very happy with it. It doesn't worth to go to the "crazy good looking one" and later regret, plus spending expensive shipping for return.

If for some reason I have no choice but buying a sofa online, I'd rather do some research about reviews from other users. Someone might cares the same details and quality like you, someone might not, but if a sofa has 80% of good reviews from general users, I think it is much more valuable than one of your friend's opinion.

I'd say you could probably buy before trying if you are not able to go to the store. You just have to do a little investigating is all. If your mother already has a chair, measure it's seat height, seat depth and seat width as well as all of the overall dimensions and compare it to the ones on the chair that you would like to buy. Most websites have dimensions posted and you can usually call and ask a sales person to give them to you or send you a tear sheet which will have all of the details on it.
Also you should DEFINITELY ask them to send a sample of the upholstery. It never looks the same online and in real life and you can't really get a good sense of the texture and or pattern from looking at it online. Most good furniture companies will be happy to send you a small sample of the upholstery. Ask for the biggest one you can get. The only other piece of advice I can give is to try to get as much information about how the piece is constructed. you don't need to go see the chair in person to do that anyway. It never hurts to call or email a sales person and get as much information out of them as possible. I would ask for things like care instructions, what is it filled with, if there's wood, is it solid or just a veneer, stuff like that.

I say go for it but do your research. AND find out what their return policy. If after all of your research you find that the chair still is not what you were expecting, see if there is a way to send the chair back so your mother's not stuck with a chair she doesn't like.

Good Luck!

Buy local! I purchased our six dining room chairs (upholstered Parsons chairs with slipcovers) for more than $1200 from a reputable catalog merchant (rhymes with "mallard") with which I'd had a previous satisfactory experience. The chairs were poorly made. The slipcover fabric was cheap and carelessly stitched. Two of the casters were damaged. Two more broke within weeks of minimal use. The company's customer service support was unhelpful and indifferent. I spent months trying to get replacement casters. I should have spent that energy trying to arrange for return freight and filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. As soon as we can afford to replace them, we will dump them off at Goodwill and purchase chairs from a local retailer. Never again.

Go to a local furniture store with Mom and try out chairs, checking things like seat height and depth. For example, my Mom is short, so some seat depths are just too deep for her feet to reach the floor.

Make note of things like foam density and cushion composition (Down? Down over foam?). Some like sink-in cushy, some don't. Don't pay any attention to style... you are just really doing a mini-ergonomic and comfort preference test.

Then, with this list of ideal dimensions and construction preferences, you can make a much more informed online choice.

But check online return policy carefully. Most have generous return policies, but some do impose restocking fees and return shipping, etc.

purly--

Six chairs for $1200 means you are in a $200/chair price point, which is not exactly high-end in the industry. MOST furniture is still "you get what you pay for".

I know this question was also posted on the SF site last week but these responses are great as well. Sorry for the overlap.

Since my mother lives in a different state in a small city with no good quality furniture stores it's been left to me to come up with a solution. And these answers are a huge help. I normally would never advice a client to purchase a piece online that's going to be used quite a bit unless sitting in it first. I've found that the couple of chairs that we're considering are online with no brick and mortar store to visit, hence the question. So thanks again for all the responses.

Patrick, even so, a $1200 expenditure is a significant one in my tax bracket--and a $1200 customer deserves to be treated better than I was. But that strays from my original point. If I'd gone with a local merchant, where I could have taken a chair for a test drive -- er, sit, I wouldn't have bought them. And, if I had purchased furniture that I'd subsequently found to be sub-par, it would have been much easier to return it to a local store, without having to deal with packing materials and a freight company.

I commented on this on the first go around but I am going to again as I feel quite strongly about buying locally when at all possible. If we don't support our local stores who have an investment in premises and stock, and who allow us to touch, feel, sit, examine, they will go broke and have to close. I understand that one can often save what seems at first to be a lot of money by buying on line but like purlgrey's example above, the shipping and return policy can add up, not to mention the inconvenience. I have found online prices with all the extras are often the same, or very close to, buying locally.

purl--
No, I understand that can be a significant amount, but not in the grand scheme of furniture pricing, especially when you look at unit cost versus your grand total. And plus, a local merchant STILL could have delivered six sub-par chairs with broken casters and shoddy slipcovers, even if the one you sat on was pristine and perfect.

And not everyone shares your philosophy that retruning something yourself is easier than arranging for freight pick up. Especially us NYers with no cars!

Furniture is a crap shoot, no matter what, and so much has to do with the delivery of it.

But your point about how the company deals with you in the aftermath of damage or disappointment is a very valid one. But local merchants don't have the automatic advantage in that category, either.

Only you know how picky you are. If you go to furniture store after furniture store and can't find anything you like when you see it in person, then the odds of finding a piece you love on the internet are pretty remote. I probably wouldn't buy a large piece I hadn't seen in person unless it was extremely easy to return. I have seen very inexpensive items that I thought looked fantastic and I have seen very expensive items that looked, well, cheap. To avoid buying blind, I have actually booked a cheap air ticket to SF (I live in LA...) to check out some pieces I was considering. Although I didn't find anything that worked for me on that trip, it was completely worth the $89 cab fare to avoid the hassle and cost of return freight. Plus I got to spend the day in SF.

If you must buy it remotely, contact the store and ask them to email you a couple photos taken of the item as it sits on the floor. Product photography can hide a multitude of sins, but a high quality snapshot by a store clerk can be quite unforgiving. This won't answer the "comfort" question, but it will give you a sense of whether the item appears to be well made. If you don't love it in the snapshot, move on to the next possibility.

correction: that should read "$89 plus cab fare"...

Gallivant - point taken and I agree. However, as I stated "my mother lives in a different state in a small city with no good quality furniture stores " this is a hard philosophy to stick to this time.

In answer to your question in how to sit in pieces seen online...A few months ago I used a company called L.A. Design Concepts (www.ladesignconcepts.com) that sells true designer furniture to consumers that is normally sold through designers only. Eventhough they are based in L.A., they are able to help anyone in the United States. I wanted to be able to sit in some chairs and a sofa I had seen online. The pieces I was interested in were from a company that only sold to designers. Another dilemma...until I found L.A. Design Concepts. They provided me a letter to the design center so that I could see these pieces in person and also sit in them! It really helped me to make my decision. It was much better than buying something based on a photo. If you happen to live in a major city close to a design center, they can send this letter to your email. Check out their website. I am very pleased with their services and was able to save a substantial amount comparred to using a designer.