The growth of the online home goods market slowed in 2018—but not by much. Sales for the 100 e-retailers in the Housewares/Home Furnishings category—in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 ranking of North America’s leading web merchants—grew 27.0% in 2018, down from 29.5% in 2017.
Among the 14 merchandise categories tracked by Internet Retailer, 2018 sales growth among the Housewares/Home Furnishings retailers ranked second only to the 31.1% growth among the 35 Food/Beverage retailers in the Top 1000, according to the just-released Internet Retailer 2019 Online Home Goods Report. Also included in the report are results of an exclusive consumer survey about online home goods shopping habits.
Online sales represented 93.7% of the growth in home goods sales in 2018 and accounted for 22.8% of home goods retail purchases. Compared with 2017, online sales of home goods grew 23.7% in 2018. The top seller in this market is Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2019 Top 1000).
The fastest-growing dedicated home goods retailer in 2018 was a company now known as Resident—a web-only mattress, furniture and home accessories brand. The company posted year-over-year growth of 525.0%, making it the fastest-growing retailer of any kind in the Top 1000.
The mattress brand Nectar Sleep established Resident Home in 2019 as the parent for Nectar and its affiliated brands, which include a newly launched furniture brand called Bundle, the Wovenly rug brand and three additional mattress brands. The other mattress brands are Awara Sleep, an eco-friendly, hybrid (foam plus springs) mattress; DreamCloud, which combines latex and pocketed micro coils; and the Level therapeutic mattress.
Nectar began selling mattresses in stores in January 2019, starting with a rollout to Mattress Warehouse’s network of more than 250 stores along the East Coast, Craig Schmeizer, co-founder of Resident says. Nectar now distributes mattresses in 1,100 stores and expects to increase that to 2,500 by year-end.
Resident is not the only web-only home goods retailer moving into the bricks-and-mortar space. For example, Wayfair Inc. earlier this year announced plans to open its first physical store in fall 2019 in Natick, Massachusetts.
The 64-page Online Home Goods Report provides data and in-depth analysis of online home goods merchants and their strategies for further expanding their share of one of retailing’s most important markets. It includes:
- Full ranking of America’s 100 largest home goods online retailers, ranked by 2018 web sales.
- List of the 10 fastest-growing home goods e-retailers, including their 2018 growth rates and where they rank among Internet Retailer’s Top 1000 web merchants.
- Amazon’s web sales in the home goods category in 2017 and 2018.
- Data on sales growth, median conversion rates and median average tickets of each of eight home goods subcategories, such as home décor and kitchen/bath.
- Key demographic data, including income level, gender and age group of home goods shoppers.
- In-depth look at Wayfair’s struggle to generate profit.
The 2019 Online Home Goods Report can be downloaded now as a PDF for $299. Digital Commerce 360 Gold and Platinum Members receive a complimentary copy of this report as a part of their membership.
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