Sales of grills and outdoor furniture heat up online as summer approaches

As usual, Amazon is leading the charge as top merchant for grills and outdoor furniture, capturing 39.5 percent of grill sales and 50.6 percent of outdoor furniture in the last year. Amazon launched two private-label furniture brands late last year in their continued effort to dominate retail, demonstrating that when it comes to selling furniture, they won’t be sitting down.

While Amazon had the highest growth rate for online outdoor furniture sales at 67.8 percent, Wayfair proved its mettle with an impressive 65 percent growth rate. Interestingly, sales during Wayfair’s WayDay week accounted for over 8 percent of their outdoor furniture revenue for the entire year. 

Target also saw a 55.4 percent increase in online outdoor furniture revenue last year. On the other end of the spectrum, Ikea and Home Depot had the lowest growth rates in the last year at 15 and 18 percent respectively.

Slice Intelligence data suggests that while more buyers flocked to online retailers for summer experience accessories last year, spending per buyer decreased. Dollars per buyer for grills decreased by 11.1 percent and landed at $124.63. Furniture spend per buyer decreased by by 12.7 percent to $192.19 per buyer.

“As the e-commerce channel matures, and as consumers become increasingly comfortable with it, we see categories that would have historically been seen as risky starting to grow significantly," said Ken Cassar, principle analyst, Slice Intelligence. "Twenty years ago, consumers wouldn’t buy lettuce online because they didn’t trust that it would be up to their standards. Today they do. Twenty years ago, merchants wouldn’t have even tried to sell grills and outdoor furniture online, but today they’ve built entire fulfillment systems that allow them to do so quite effectively.”

With a panel of over 5.5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time, which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.