Key Takeaways
• The two online companies, Wayfair and Overstock.com, both experienced their largest peaks in online orders around the holidays.
• Wayfair experienced an increase in year-over-year online orders, but Overstock.com and Ikea saw declines.
• Overstock.com’s online market share has declined since January 2017, while Wayfair’s has increased.
Furniture shopping isn’t the family weekend activity it used to be. Nowadays, we’re increasingly likely to order our furniture online, have it shipped over, and even assemble it ourselves. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2021, about 27% of revenue made from furniture purchases will be from online sales. While Ikea pioneered the flatpack industry, allowing you to assemble your own furniture, Direct To Consumer (DTC) brands Wayfair and Overstock.com went in an entirely online direction. Having previously looked at how online home furnishing brand Wayfair performed during its Way Day 2019 and 2018 promotions, Edison Trends next examined over 60,000 transactions to understand how three furniture retailers fared in online sales.
Figure 1a: Chart shows estimated online orders by month for Wayfair, Overstock.com, and Ikea from January 1, 2017 to August 31, 2019, according to Edison Trends. The data is normalized - i.e. was scaled so that the highest monthly number of orders was set to 100. This analysis is based on over 60,000 transactions.
Wayfair leads in number of monthly online orders, as they have for over two years. The two online companies, Wayfair and Overstock.com, both experienced their largest peaks in online orders around the holidays (November 2017 and November 2018). Wayfair also saw spikes in sales during its invented Way Day holiday sale (April 2018 and April 2019). Interestingly, while these April order numbers are high, they don’t come close to matching the spike in November from both Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
In contrast, Ikea online order numbers have remained fairly steady throughout the last two years, with 120% as many online orders this August as in the beginning of 2017.
Figure 1b: Chart shows estimated online market share of orders by month for Wayfair, Overstock.com, and Ikea from January 1, 2017 to August 31, 2019, according to Edison Trends. Note: Due to rounding, numbers may not add up to 100%.
As of August, Wayfair had the highest market share (of online orders) among these three companies, at 65%. Overstock.com was next at 30%, followed by Ikea at 5%. Wayfair’s lowest market share (49%) and Overstock.com’s highest (46%) occurred in the same month — May 2017. Since then, Wayfair’s market share has been steadily increasing, while Overstock.com’s has been steadily decreasing. Ikea's market share hit its two-year peak in June and August of 2019 at 11%. Their market share has not returned to that level.
Figure 2: Chart shows the estimated percent change in online orders year-over-year for Wayfair, Ikea, and Overstock.com, comparing June 1, 2019 - August 31, 2019 to June 1, 2018 - August 31, 2018, according to Edison Trends.
Comparing summer 2019 to summer 2018, Wayfair is the only one of the three companies to see growth in number of online orders, taking 23% more this summer than last summer. In contrast, Ikea's figures dropped by 3%, and Overstock.com's by 16%.
As the market evolves, we will continue to stay on top of the latest trends. To learn more about how Edison Trends can help your business, contact us at bizdev@edison.tech. For more up-to-date insights in the e-commerce space, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on Twitter at @EdisonTrends.
*The data shown is based on a sample of anonymized and aggregated e-receipts from millions of consumers in the United States.