Choosing furniture, whether you’re moving into a new home or just updating your space, can feel like a daunting task.

Spending hours browsing one furniture store after another may be overwhelming and time consuming. Many shoppers are skipping the brick-and-mortar furniture stores and turning to the web in search of stylish and competitively priced furniture options.

In 2023, the United States led the market for furniture e-commerce worldwide, with estimated revenues exceeding 90 billion dollars.

The benefits of shopping for furniture online include access to a wider range of options, the ability to easily compare choices, and having reviews and ratings available before making a final decision. With all these advantages at your fingertips, is your dream home really a few clicks away? Or does the process of shopping for furniture online measure up to the experience of shopping in person?

To understand the home furniture researching and purchasing experience, we used MUiQ to collect UX data on a variety of attitudes and intentions toward six popular home furniture websites:

• Ashley
• Crate & Barrel
• Ikea
• Pottery Barn
• Wayfair
• World Market

We computed SUPR-Q^® and Net Promoter scores, investigated reasons for using the websites, measured users’ attitudes regarding their experiences, conducted key driver analyses, and analyzed reported usability problems.

Benchmark Study Details

In November of 2023, we asked 324 recent visitors of home furniture websites in the US to recall their most recent experience and perceptions of one of the furniture websites on their desktop and mobile app (if applicable) in the past year.

Participants completed the eight-item SUPR-Q (which includes the Net Promoter Score) and the two-item UX-Lite^® standardized questionnaires, and they answered questions about their brand attitudes, usage, and prior experiences.

Quality of the Home Furniture Website UX:
SUPR-Q

The SUPR-Q is a standardized questionnaire widely used for measuring attitudes toward the quality of a website user experience. Its norms are computed from a rolling database of around 200 websites across dozens of industries.

SUPR-Q scores are percentile ranks that tell you how a website’s experience ranks relative to the other websites (50^th percentile is average). The SUPR-Q provides an overall score as well as detailed scores for subdimensions of Usability, Trust, Appearance, and Loyalty.

The home furniture websites in this study collectively performed well and averaged in the 78^th percentile. Pottery Barn had the highest SUPR-Q score (98^th percentile), while Wayfair scored the lowest (49^th percentile).

Usability Scores and Appearance

We asked participants to rate how easy they thought it was to use and navigate the websites. All websites scored above the 50^th percentile in usability. Pottery Barn had the highest usability score (99^th percentile), while Wayfair scored the lowest (52^nd percentile).

Participants on Wayfair mentioned trouble using the website due to the  overwhelming design, cluttered webpages, and difficulty searching, including hard-to-use filters and irrelevant search results. Comments regarding usability for Wayfair included:

• “I find their website to be deliberating confusing. Many of the pages display links to the same products over and over with different names.” — Wayfair

• “There is sometimes too much available and I find myself sorting through many products that don’t meet what I’m looking for.” — Wayfair

We also asked participants to rate the appearance of the home furniture websites. Appearance scores were mixed, with Pottery Barn having the highest score (99^th percentile). Crate & Barrel was not far behind at the 93^rd percentile. Wayfair had the lowest appearance scores among the competitors (45^th percentile). While appearance scores were high overall, participants did have issues with cluttered webpages and annoying ads and popups on all six home furniture websites. Clutter was the top issue mentioned on the Crate & Barrel and World Market websites.

• “It’s too ‘noisy’—too many images, moving pictures, overwhelming amount of content. I prefer simpler minimalist websites.” — Crate & Barrel

• “It is VERY busy and a little chaotic.” — World Market

Loyalty/Net Promoter Scores

In general, a better user experience is a good predictor of customer loyalty. The average NPS for the home furniture websites was 11% (more promoters than detractors). World Market had the highest loyalty score (86^th percentile) and the highest NPS (24%). Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel were not far behind, both scoring 16% for NPS. Wayfair and Ikea were the least likely to be recommended, both with an NPS of 2%. Comments about the home furniture websites related to NPS included:

• “Because of my history with the company, I know that they are credible, and I feel comfortable using and purchasing products from the website.” — World Market

• “I would recommend the site to someone that I know who I can afford it. It used to be (20 years ago), Pottery Barn offered a lot of normal things, but also, things that were just a bit different/unique that they weren’t found anywhere else. So, the higher price back when for unique things somewhat justified their prices. But now, in 2023, a lot of items on Pottery Barn’s site can be found on many other websites. The prices at Pottery Barn are good quality, but I also know how to shuffle through many other sites now for high quality at a much lower price.” — Pottery Barn

• “It is a good place to find what you are looking for, but product availability in store is often not accurate, so it is always better to go to the store and look for it there.” — Ikea

More verbatim comments are available in the downloadable report.

Websites and Mobile App Usage

As a part of this benchmark, we asked participants how they accessed the home furniture websites. All participants reported using their desktop/laptop computers (this was a requirement for participation in the survey), with 79% also using mobile websites and 38% also using mobile apps. Comments about the home furniture websites related to the mobile app usage included:

• “I love IKEA, I don’t know what I’d do with my spare time without the app, I use it so much. It’s easy to navigate and they have everything I need. I rarely need to look elsewhere. They deserve a high rating because they earn it and they strive for that because they care about the customers.” — Ikea

• “Crate & Barrel sells practical and high-quality kitchen accessories. The app and website are easy to use and provide great images of the items selected.” — Crate & Barrel

Users reported visiting the home furniture websites and apps a few times per year or less.

Key Drivers of the Home Furniture Website Experience

To better understand what affects SUPR-Q scores and Likelihood-to-Recommend (LTR) ratings, we asked respondents to rate 20 attributes of the home furniture website experience (full details are in the downloadable report).

We conducted key driver analyses (regression modeling) to quantify the extent to which ratings on these items drive (account for) variation in overall SUPR-Q scores and, separately, LTR (the rating from which the NPS is derived).

SUPR-Q Drivers. As shown in Figure 1, the top key driver from the list was “It’s easy to browse for items,” accounting for 16% of the variability in SUPR-Q scores. This was followed by “The product images are clear” (11%) and “The website is cluttered” (10%). Taken together, six significant predictors accounted for 62% of the variance in the SUPR-Q scores.

Figure 1: Key drivers of the SUPR-Q.

What to Improve: Key Drivers

Comparing the SUPR-Q and LTR models, “I can quickly find the brands I want” and “I’m confident I’ll be satisfied with my purchase” were significant key drivers of both. However, an examination of the mean top-box scores for these items showed that agreement with these statements was low across the home furniture websites.

On average, only 35% of participants strongly agreed that they could quickly find the brands they were interested in, and only 36% strongly agreed that they would be satisfied with their purchase. This suggests that some of the most important drivers could use the most improvement.

Other key drivers highlighted as common problems and frustrations across the home furniture websites included cluttered webpages, frequent ads and popups, and difficult browsing on the website.

Clutter on the home furniture websites was a pain point

Clutter on the websites was a top key driver of the website experience, and as mentioned previously, clutter was a common frustration for participants across the home furniture websites. Users on all six sites encountered annoying popups, busy webpages, and overwhelming options. Clutter was mentioned as the top issue for Crate & Barrel (Figure 2) and World Market.

• “The website is a little ‘busy’ and overwhelming because there is so much information and products on the homepage. This makes finding a specific item a little frustrating at times.” — World Market

• “It appears cluttered with a lot of information. I also received a popup for a discount/sale, which, while nice, is also annoying when I’m trying to browse.” — Crate & Barrel

Figure 2: Popups, like this one on the Crate & Barrel website, annoyed users as they navigated the home furniture websites.

Participants felt berated by sales and advertisements on the home furniture websites.

• “[Wayfair] reminds me of Kohl’s or something where everything is always on sale. That strategy has a certain ‘cheapness’ to the brand and perceived quality of furniture.” — Wayfair

• “My biggest frustration would be having to close a popup ad on the site wanting me to enter information for a savings. While I do like a good idea, I find these ads to be aggressive and intrusive when I’m trying to browse a website.” — Ashley

• “I think that they include different offers or sales that are too big, or take up too much of the page space.” — World Market

• “Additionally, I was unhappy with the number of ads and promos on integrated into the website that could not be blocked by my adblocker.” — World Market

When asked to rate their agreement to the statement “Overall the website is cluttered,” participants rated the Wayfair and World Market websites as more cluttered compared to the other home furniture websites—statistically more cluttered than the Ikea website (Figure 3).

• “It’s clean and competently designed.” — Ikea

• “Easy to use website with a clean and modern design.” — Ikea

• “I like Ikea’s products a lot, and I find their website really attractive. It’s clean, the simplistic design is nice to look at. I enjoy browsing it.” — Ikea

Figure 3: While participants were overwhelmed by the number of products on the Ikea website, they felt that the website had a simpler design compared to other home furniture websites.

Difficult to find specific items quickly

The ease of finding specific products or brands was a key driver of the overall website experience and the participants’ likelihood to recommend the home furniture websites. This was a frequent problem across the home furniture websites. Participants struggled to wade through enormous inventories and bloated menu structures (Figure 4). When searching, participants also struggled with irrelevant search results.

• “It’s a little too categorized. You have to click many options before it shows you items.” — Crate & Barrel

Figure 4: Participants found Crate & Barrel’s Furniture category large and cumbersome to read through.

• “Sometimes it is hard to find an item because I am not sure which category it falls under.” — Ikea

• “Not finding exactly what I’m looking for at a reasonable time frame. I would have to search multiple departments or areas within the site.” — Ikea

• “It’s hard to find a specific type and style of furniture when I know in my head what it looks like. They all have fancy names that I don’t know, so it’s hard to navigate to them on the website without knowing those terms.” — Ashley

• “If I had to pick a negative, I would say that it’s slightly cluttered and might be difficult to find the exact piece you’re looking for if you already have something in mind.” — World Market

Participants on Ikea also noticed that product variations, such as color, are listed as separate items on the search results page (Figure 5). This made it difficult for participants to find all the options for a particular product and created more search results for participants to scroll through.

• “I don’t like that it shows every product color option as a different product.” — Ikea

Figure 5: Participants didn’t like that the Ikea website listed the same chair in different colors as four separate items on the search results page.

Low confidence in purchase satisfaction

Confidence in purchase satisfaction was a key driver of the overall website experience (SUPR-Q) and the likelihood of recommending the home furniture websites; however, there was low agreement to this statement across the websites.

Participants mentioned concerns about items being low quality or cheaply made, especially on the Wayfair website (Figure 6).

• “I’ve purchased from Wayfair in the past … it seems like things are always on back order or cheaply made. My concern is about product quality.” — Wayfair

• “I like it and have had luck but I know that some products can be cheap/untested and may lack reviews.” — Wayfair

Figure 6: One-star reviews on the Wayfair website related to product quality.

Alternatively, participants on the Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel websites felt that the items were of higher quality, but prices were too expensive.

• “I love Pottery Barn and the quality of its merchandise. The customer service is excellent as well.” — Pottery Barn

• “I think they have a well curated selection of items that are appropriate for everyone on the website. It is a good selection, but I feel that some of the prices are a little expensive for what you get. If you can find a coupon, then it can be worth it.” — Pottery Barn

• “It is a good store with high quality products. If you have the money to spend and want nicer quality things, it’s a good option.” — Crate & Barrel

• “The products are expensive but high quality, and the website looks good.” — Crate & Barrel

Summary and Takeaways

An analysis of the user experience of six home furniture websites found:

1. Furniture websites have a generally good user experience. The home furniture websites in this study collectively performed well and averaged in the 78^th percentile. Pottery Barn received the highest SUPR-Q score at the 98^th percentile, while Wayfair scored the lowest at the 49^th percentile. The World Market website was the most likely to be recommended, and participants also had the most favorable attitudes toward World Market.

2. Cluttered websites with frequent popups encumber the experience. Clutter was a top key driver of the overall SUPR-Q scores, and it was a top issue for participants on all six home furniture websites. Cluttered webpages, frequent and annoying popups, and overwhelming amounts of information frustrated users as they navigated the furniture sites.

3. Overwhelming inventories and menus are difficult to navigate. The home furniture websites felt overwhelming to users due to extremely large inventories and product menus that were difficult to navigate. The ability to find specific brands or items was a significant key driver of the website experience and likelihood to recommend, and this felt challenging across the websites.

4. Quality is a concern. Confidence in purchase satisfaction was also a significant key driver of the website experience and likelihood to recommend. Across the home furniture websites, only 36% strongly agreed that they were confident they would be satisfied with their purchase. Participants, especially on the Wayfair website, had concerns about product quality.

For more details, see the downloadable report.