What is Wayfair? Wayfair Review, Features

Wayfair is the largest home furnishing e-commerce company in the United States. It adopts a light-asset operation model, has high gross profit margins and operational efficiency, and is gradually building its own logistics.

origin

Wayfair was co-founded by Niraj Shah and Steve Conine in August 2002. It was originally a small store called CSN. CSN operated a website called racksandstands.com, which specialized in selling furniture for storage and home entertainment. Later, CSN gradually established multiple websites to sell other household goods and furniture.

Until 2010, CSN's expansion slowed down, but its performance was growing steadily. The company had more than 600 employees, more than 200 websites, and annual sales of $380 million. And by 2010, CSN had not received a penny of financing.

In 2011, Shah and Conine decided to unify all websites under one brand to enhance business operations and wanted to further improve the company through external financing. Thus, the Wayfair brand was born.

About Wayfair

70% of Wayfair’s customers are women, aged between 35 and 65, with annual household incomes between $60,000 and $175,000.

Wayfair had 1.2 million active users in 2012, which grew 61% to 2.1 million in 2013. It shipped 1.8 million orders in 2012, which grew 85.2% to 3.3 million in 2013. The average order price was $300 in 2012, which grew to $322 in 2013 and rose to $332 in the first half of 2014.

In 2013, the repeat purchase rate of Wayfair customers was 47.2%, compared to only 37.4% in 2012. Before 2012, Wayfair mainly served the United States. Currently, Wayfair has coverage in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Austria, Ireland, and New Zealand. In 2013, international revenue was US$41.5 million, accounting for 4.5%.

Financing

In July 2011, Wayfair received $165 million in investment from multiple venture capital firms.

In March 2014, Wayfair received $157 million in Series B funding, led by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc.

In October 2014, Wayfair raised more than $300 million through its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Development scale

As of January 2014, Wayfair is the largest online furniture retailer in the United States, and the 33rd largest online retailer in the United States. The company's revenue was $380 million in 2010, exceeding $500 million in 2011, exceeding $600 million in 2012, exceeding $900 million in 2013, and exceeding $1.3 billion in 2014. Wayfair's net income increased to $2.25 billion in 2015, $1.7 billion to $1.7 billion in 2016, and $4.7 billion in 2017.