Home Decor Ecommerce: Proven Trends, Strategies and Examples (2026)

The home decor industry is dominated by big-box retailers. That’s not to say it’s impossible to sell home furnishings online—it just takes a smarter, more creative approach to attract customers and deliver on their expectations. 

In this guide, you’ll learn the biggest consumer trends shaping home decor purchases and how to position your brand as the best option. We’ll also cover marketing and fulfillment strategies to handle ecommerce operations, and examples of home decor brands putting these strategies to work. 

The home decor ecommerce market in 2026

The home decor industry is worth over $33 billion, with the sector set to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.11% through 2030. When divided by the US population, this equates to an average annual spend of $97.54.

This spend spans several product categories including furniture, textiles, wall art, lighting, and accents. There are also several business models—DTC brands, marketplaces, and curated retailers—in the industry. Some brands stick to just one (think Parachute), while others take a hybrid approach (like mattress brand Casper’s partnership with Target).

Home decor ecommerce differs from general home goods retail because:

• Customers rely on digital visuals, descriptions, and inspiration to make purchase decisions, rather than touching items in person.
• Items are shipped to your customer, rather than collected in-store. You’ll need reliable shipping partners and a solid returns-management program to handle logistics. 

Key consumer trends shaping home decor purchases

The furnishings industry is constantly changing as consumer behavior evolves and new products enter the market. Home decor trends dominating in 2026 include:

• Remote work: Roughly a quarter of employees work from home, and 52% have a hybrid of in-person and remote work. But it’s not just home offices that people are investing in—spending more time at home influences their willingness to spend on decor.
• Consumer spending patterns: Gen Z and millennial households allocate more discretionary spending to decorative accessories than other demographics. 
• Sustainability: Demand for home decor made with sustainable materials—such as bamboo, recycled glass, and reclaimed wood—is growing. So is consumers’ willingness to renovate their own homes: the same report found US consumers spend $5,635 on home renovation projects, on average. 
• Smart home integration: By 2029, it’s estimated that 92.5% of all households will have a smart home device. This includes smart appliances, lighting systems, and entertainment systems. 

Essential features for home decor ecommerce stores

Visual commerce 

Home decor purchases are visual—you’ll need high-quality image galleries, including lifestyle photography, to showcase products in context. Offer zoom functionality to let customers see the finer details.

Home decor brand Article is one retailer heavily leaning into visual commerce with a 40-person in-house creative team. In an interview with eMarketer, their SVP of marketing, support, and sales, Duncan Blair, said: “Our studio is constantly trying to think about how to capture details of products to make sure that people have a good sense of materiality, dimensions, and all the other things that you look for when you go into a store to pick out furniture.”

Combine this with room-visualization tools to let online shoppers imagine what products will look like in their own homes. Monte Design, for example, has a “View in your room” tool that uses augmented reality to overlay a 3D model of popular products onto a customer’s smartphone camera. 

Detailed product specifications

Some home decor items are high-consideration purchases—customers need to know they’re choosing the right option before they commit to a purchase. This is especially true for large items. If someone is purchasing a sofa online, for example, they need to know it’ll fit in their space.

Ease these concerns with detailed product descriptions that cover elements such as:

• Dimensions (height, width, and depth)
• Weight 
• Materials 
• Finish or texture
• Whether assembly is required 
• Care instructions
• Safety information

Arhaus takes this one step further with free fabric swatches. Online shoppers can select up to five swatches through a popup form on the relevant product page. This not only enhances the buying experience, but also allows the Arhaus team to collect customer data they can use for future targeting.

Mobile commerce

Revenue generated from a mobile device now accounts for 63% of all global retail sales as consumers spend a collective $2.5 trillion from their devices.

Catering to these shopping habits goes beyond simply having a responsive design for your home decor ecommerce website. The user experience needs to be just as good as it is on the desktop you likely designed it on, with features like:

• Fast page-load speeds
• Finger-friendly buttons
• Advanced search and filtering options
• Large, zoomable product images
• Guest checkout and mobile wallet payment methods

Take Emma Bridgewater, for example. The iconic British homeware brand set out to improve the mobile user experience with a complete redesign and introduction of localized storefronts for international customers. The result was a 13% increase in mobile revenue and a 32% boost in new users.

“The homepage is much more dynamic now, and the imagery we can use is much better,” says Samantha Marsh, ecommerce manager, on Emma Bridgewater’s migration to Shopify. “Everything is a bit freer.”

B2B storefront

Selling to other businesses opens up a world of new opportunities. There’s the obvious downside of selling each individual item for a lower price, but bulk orders and high customer retention rates found in B2B can make it a strong growth channel for home decor brands.

Home decor brand Brooklinen, for example, disrupted the luxury bedding market by offering hotel-quality linens directly to consumers. It sells direct to consumer as well as wholesale—both of which are managed through Shopify.

With Shopify, Brooklinen can:

• Create a B2B customer portal to gate wholesale prices
• Handle quote requests
• Encourage repeat orders
• View B2B company data for advanced personalization 

“B2B on Shopify allows us to engage with these customers in a new way—kind of like a typical DTC customer but for B2B,” says Kelly Hallinan, Brooklinen’s senior vice president of emerging channels.

“Now, we can see that a large hospitality group purchased from us six months ago,” Kelly says. “We know the average amount of time in between orders, and we can say, ‘Okay, we’re at that point where we can send them an email asking about placing a reorder.’ It’s much harder to do that without Shopify’s back-end system.”

Marketing strategies for home decor ecommerce

Content marketing and inspiration galleries

Consumers who buy home decor have a particular vision in mind for their room. Help them visualize what your products will look like in their space with an inspiration gallery—a collection of images that showcase your products in situ. 

These inspiration galleries can serve as a point of reference for each stage in the buying process:

• Top of funnel: Create Pinterest boards or Instagram carousels to showcase your inspiration galleries and reach people when they’re searching for inspiration. 
• Middle of funnel: Create dedicated landing pages on your website to showcase product lifestyle shots and target keywords your ideal customer is searching for, such as “coastal bathroom furniture" or “minimalist kitchen designs.” Use them as the focus of retargeting campaigns to drive otherwise-lost traffic back to your site. Make the content shoppable by linking back to relevant product pages.
• Bottom of funnel: Lean on user-generated content (UGC) to build inspiration galleries on the product page itself. Sofa Club, for example, has an “In real life” widget to showcase their sofas in a customer’s home.

🏡Discover: How Sofa Club & Shopify are disrupting the furniture industry with speed and style

Leveraging visual social platforms

Visual social platforms lend themselves well to showcasing your products online, as home decor purchases are about making a space look better. That includes:

• Instagram: Share Reels, carousels, and Stories that take followers behind the scenes of creating your home decor. Boll & Branch, for instance, shared this Instagram Reel to share how they set up their popup shop, featuring their bedding products in context. 
• TikTok: About 70% of US Gen Zers discover products on TikTok, and just over 42% said TikTok is the most useful platform for product research. Industry West, for example, uses their TikTok account to show how to style products in a home. 
• Pinterest: Share product photos to Pinterest to help potential customers find products that fit their aesthetic. Happy Houseplants, for example, shared this image to Pinterest, which links back to the product page on their home decor ecommerce website. You can also have the platform’s AR shopping feature support users who want to see the product in their own home.

💡Tip: Most social commerce platforms have shopping capabilities to sync your catalog and enable in-app checkout. Shopify’s real-time unified data model makes this easy. It shares product descriptions and inventory availability with the social storefront to ensure consistency and prevent stockouts. Orders funnel back to Shopify’s order management system for quick and easy fulfillment. 

Influencer and designer partnerships

Influencers give access to something consumers don’t see on a regular basis: their home. A virtual peek behind their front door, you can position your home decor products in an influencer’s home and subtly sell to the people viewing their social media content.

Per LTK, these so-called “influential shoppers” can grow influencer recommended sales and engagement by 2x. It’s why 67% of marketers plan to increase influencer budgets in 2026. 

For your influencer marketing budget to pay off:

• Find the right partners. An influencer’s audience should overlap your buyer persona and share content relevant to what you’re selling. Decor accessory brand Frogtape, for example, partnered with Living With Ley, an influencer who shares her DIY home decor projects on Instagram, to create a “before and after” carousel of her painting her bedroom using Frogtape. 
• Offer incentives to their audience. Give followers an extra incentive to buy with an exclusive discount code. This can help with attribution—track discount code usage to attribute sales to a particular influencer or piece of sponsored content. 
• Commission vs. sponsored content. Sponsored content gives you more control over how your brand is portrayed since you have a sign-off process before the post goes live. That said, it’s expensive. Consider an affiliate program where influencers earn commission on any sales they make but have strict policies in place to ensure brand consistency. 

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Retail activations 

Retail is thriving. Last year, Shopify merchants with a brick-and-mortar store generated an average of 81% of their total sales in person. They saw a 23% year-over-year jump in offline sales overall. 

Retail activations are temporary events that turn physical locations into experiences. They let customers see, touch, and style products they’d normally buy online with a showroom popup.

Events also help collect first-party data you can use for future retargeting. For example, if someone visited your popup and talked about moving home, have your store associate note this on their unified customer profile and enroll them in your “Moving home” email series.

Jenni Kaye uses Shopify’s unified commerce platform to enable this advanced omnichannel personalization. The team uses client history reporting to tailor the experience every shopper gets.

“You don’t buy a living room overnight,” says Sam Mella, director of home experience at Jenni Kaye. “But if we had insights about these customers based on our previous interactions online and in-person, then we could follow up and thoughtfully guide them through the purchasing journey.”

💡Tip: If you’re selling large or bulky items that customers can’t take home the same day, use Shopify POS to place their order in-store and have it shipped directly to their house. Alternatively, you can send a personalized email cart containing the items they viewed at the retail location for them to purchase later.

Operational considerations for home decor ecommerce businesses

Inventory planning for seasonal demand

Home decor is heavily influenced by seasonality. Sales of outdoor furniture might slow down over the winter months while cozy blankets fly off the shelves. This makes inventory planning a challenge: you don’t want to pay to store excess stock that might no longer be in style when the next season rolls around, and you don’t want stockouts that drive customers away. 

AI-powered demand-forecasting tools help estimate how many products you’ll need at certain points throughout the year. They combine first-party data—such as historical sales data and manufacturer lead times—with external information like:

• Weather forecasts
• Consumer behavior patterns 
• Changing regulations
• Social media sentiment 

Note that you don’t have to source products from scratch in your inventory plan. Sweet Water Decor uses Shopify Collective to source everything from area rugs to seasonal decor from 35 other Shopify brands. They’ve widened their product assortment without the traditional logistical headache of buying wholesale. 

When a customer buys a product from a supplier on the Sweet Water Decor website, their order details are passed to the partner to fulfill. They only pay suppliers once the orders ship. Some 9% of total annual sales flow through Collective across both supplier and retailer activities.

“Collective has become our gateway to building meaningful vendor relationships—it's created mutual success opportunities where everybody wins,” says associate merchant Mackenzie Allshouse. 

Shipping and fulfillment for fragile products

Home decor products vary in size, fragility, and value—not every item ships the same way, which can present challenges for shipping and fulfillment. 

• Choose the right shipping materials. The last thing you want is for an item to turn up damaged. For easily breakable items such as glassware, choose a shipping box with minimal empty space for the product to move around during transit. Pack it with protective materials and use fragile stickers.
• Consider white-glove delivery. Instead of simply dropping an expensive or fragile item on a customer’s doorstep, partner with a white-glove delivery service. They’ll unpack, assemble, and install your products, then remove excess packaging from the customer’s home.
• Offer flexible fulfillment. A hybrid approach could combine in-house fulfillment for large items and a third-party logistics (3PL) partner for smaller accessories. Similarly, if you have retail stores, treat these as mini fulfillment centers with buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options.

If you’re making custom orders with lengthy lead times, set expectations up front. Lulu and Georgia, for example, have a filtering tool to show estimated shipping times for each individual SKU—shoppers can compare their options and weigh up whether a different fabric is worth waiting for. The retailer also has a product category dedicated to items that are in stock and available to ship. 

Returns and damage management

Home decor returns can be costly, especially for large or fragile items. It’s not uncommon to lose a large portion of your profit margin by absorbing the cost of returns shipping.

The most obvious way to combat this is by limiting free returns. Yet there’s a trade-off: by requiring customers to pay for their own shipping labels, you don’t have to lose extra money when processing their refund. But 9 in 10 customers expect free returns as standard. Consider whether this risk to the customer experience outweighs the money you’re losing by footing the bill. 

Other methods to handle home decor returns:

• Create a self-serve returns portal. Write clear return policies that state what is eligible for a return, how to submit one, and the refund type (for example, a refund, exchange, or store credit). Use an app like Loop or AfterShip to pull this data and create a self-serve returns portal that eases the burden on your customer support team.
• Require photo verification upon delivery. Around 9% of all returns are fraudulent. One issue plaguing home decor retailers is when a customer claims an item wasn’t delivered to receive a full refund. Avoid this by partnering with shipping carriers that take a delivery confirmation photo.
• Add a returns survey. If customers are returning an item that arrived broken or damaged, you’ll know in advance. This helps with quality control and inventory planning—you’ll get advanced notice of what’s coming back to you (and why), so you can plan to repair and resell the decor. 

Technology and apps to power home decor ecommerce

Your technology infrastructure impacts your ability to offer the seamless omnichannel experiences that customers want, without putting operational strain on your team. Core components include: 

• Unified commerce platform: Unified commerce brings each business unit together under one shared data model. With Shopify, inventory, order, and customer data flow to a single operating system regardless of where the sale happened. This approach has been proven to reduce total cost of ownership by 22% and grow omnichannel GMV by 150%.
• Augmented reality: Room-visualization apps like Shopify AR let customers virtually place products in their own spaces before buying. This can give online shoppers the confidence they need to buy home decor online, while also reducing returns due to incorrect dimensions or sizing issues.
• Product customization: Allow online shoppers to tailor products, such as colors, finishes, fabrics, and sizes, with customization apps like Globo or Easify. This level of personalization can increase average order value (AOV) and help differentiate your inventory from mass-market home decor retailers.
• Bundle builders: Apps like Bundler let customers combine complementary items into a curated set or “room look” at checkout. Parachute, for example, offers up to 15% off linen bundles—a move that increases AOV and allows customers to achieve the look they want without being overwhelmed by multiple options.
• Subscription tools: Use a subscription app like Recharge to support recurring purchases of home decor items like candles, diffusers, and plants.

Successful home decor ecommerce store examples

Ruggable

Ruggable revolutionized the rug industry with machine-washable rugs, growing from a startup to more than $100 million in revenue. Their success lies in product innovation in home decor and solving a real customer pain point (cleaning).

Alongside an innovative product, Ruggable scaled their DTC home goods brand using Shopify’s checkout extensibility to separate the front-end user experience from the back-end functionality. “The site is so much faster for our customers, leading to conversion and SEO boosts,” says Daniel Graupensperger, the brand’s director of product management. “Google sees our website as being much faster now and is sending a lot more traffic to us, which is fantastic.”

Ruggable also enabled Shop Pay to reduce their checkout page from a three-step process to a single page. They even expanded internationally with Managed Markets. “We don't have to worry about things like manual pricing or tracking the currency conversion over time,” Daniel says. “Shopify does it all for us.”

Parachute

Parachute has a simple mission: to bring premium bedding and home goods to homes across the country. They use a network of retail locations to do this, alongside an online store—both of which are powered by Shopify’s unified commerce platform. 

This unified data model enables Parachute to:

• View detailed customer profiles for personalized clienteling (both online and offline)
• Offer buy online, pick up in-store options which average over 3,500 orders annually
• Support ship-from-store orders across all store locations

By migrating to Shopify, Parachute simplified their commerce stack, reducing maintenance overhead compared to their previous custom-built platform. The switch helped the team streamline operations and save more than $1 million in annual operational costs.