Ecommerce and furniture shopping

Ecommerce has changed amazingly: from a way to buy small stuff which is difficult to find in a convenient physical store, to a style of purchasing whatever one can have in mind. One of the last frontiers of online shopping could be furniture, but even this seems to have become something quite common. Here are some data related to the worldwide furniture online market.

In the early stage of online purchases, vendors usually specialised in items that were quite small, low budget, easy to pack and ship, cheap to send; people would never have considered buying online something expensive or big, especially because shipment and return would have been enormously complex and money-wasting.

Today, thanks to astonishing improvements in logistics, shipping large items – such as wardrobes, sofas or beds – is not just possible, but lots cheaper than before. This change has often resulted in experiencing furniture online shopping as more comfortable, easier and even cost-saving compared with a store purchase. Because of that, in the near future furniture online sales are expected to increase 10% each year, reaching the value of 289.3 billion USD in 2023.

Here is the ranking of the countries having the most active furniture online markets. The leader of this sector is China where it is worth 79.2b USD, followed by US [44.5b USD] and Japan [15.7b USD]. Fifth place for UK where the furniture online shopping has a value of 7.8b USD, a great amount considering that Great Britain has a population almost 20 times smaller than China.

[via: Statista]