Hard on the heels of the withdrawl of its initial public offering and receipt of another $27 million in venture funding, Furniture.com Inc. has laid off 80 employees, 40 percent of its workforce.

The layoffs are evidence that the Framingham online furniture store received its fourth round of venture cash under considerably more stringent terms than its first three rounds over the past two years, which had raised $50 million.

Furniture.com's cash infusion likely prevented it from throwing up a white flag entirely. The firm lost $46.5 million last year on revenues of $10.9 million, and similar losses don't seem to have abated. The best face CEO Andrew Brooks could put on the firm's plight this week was that it was "accelerating the path to profitability."

That path can't come soon enough for backers such as @Ventures, the venture capital arm of Andover Internet holding company CMGI Inc. (CMGI). @Ventures had a 17 percent stake in Furniture.com before the latest investment, in which it led a half-dozen other previous backers.

Furniture.com had looked to raise $50 million in an IPO, for which it filed in January. But with Internet stocks on the Nasdaq hitting their spring slump, and with investors treating online retailers as a group as if diagnosed with Legionnaire's disease, the Framingham firm was forced to postpone its offering several times before withdrawing this week.

The furniture sector has had more trouble than other retailers in converting to a Web model. Shipping costs are much high, and while buyers may use the Net to research a furniture purchase, many simply won't buy a mattress or sofa without lying or sitting on it first.

Forrester Research of Cambridge, not known for its conservative estimates, predicts that just 5 percent of furniture sales will take place over the Net in five years, leaving a batch of firms scrambling for less than $4 billion worth of business.

Furniture.com is now forced to go with a leaner, meaner business model. It had already laid off 30 workers in April, meaning that in two months the workforce is down almost in half, from 230 to 120.

Its main online competitor, Living.com of Austin, laid off 50 workers in a similar cost-cutting move earlier this year. Living.com also supplanted Furniture.com as the best designed furniture-selling site in the latest rankings of online analysts Gomez.com.

The layoffs are the latest of several among New England online firms. Electronics seller Roxy.com and Spanish-language portal Espanol.com each laid off 20 workers earlier this month, while retailers Toysmart.com and Craftshop.com both closed up shop within the past two months.

Also, CMGI companies CMGI Solutions and MyWay.com last month laid off 45 and 27 workers, repsectively.