Online sales decline for housewares & home furnishings

It was a tumultuous 2022 for the housewares/home furnishings category. The fall of long-beleaguered Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., and 30% decline in growth for Overstock.com Inc., were two standouts in the category.

However, consumers are still buying to update their homes. The mean conversion rate increased to 2.4% in 2022 compared with 2.3% the year prior.

Inflation played its part as the median average ticket increased to $501 in 2022 compared with $403 from less shoppers. In 2022, there were 413,200 median monthly unique visitors. That is a drop from 479,975 in 2021.

Online furniture sales growth slows, but is still strong with $42.83 billion in sales

There was a slowdown in overall category sales. U.S. Top 1000 online category sales reached $42.83 billion in 2022, down from $45.53 billion in 2021. That places Top 1000 online share of total retail sales (both in store and online) in the category at 29.9% — a decrease from the 32.1% penetration in 2021. U.S. total category retail sales reached $143.32 billion in 2022. That’s up from $141.96 billion in 2021, suggesting that more consumers shopped at brick and mortar locations last year.

There are 115 housewares/home furnishings retailers in the Top 1000.

While U.S. Top 1000 online category sales reached $42.83 billion in 2022, online sales in the category decreased 5.9% in 2022. That’s a sharp drop from the 8.1% online sales growth in the category in 2021. And it falls short of the modest 1.0% growth rate of overall digital and brick-and-mortar sales in the category last year, according to a Digital Commerce 360 analysis of U.S. Department of Commerce data.