Furniture and home furnishings sales fell 2.62% year over year in October, the second straight month down, while total US retail rose 3.57%, NRF data shows.
If you run a high-ticket store like the ones we build at Ecommerce Paradise and sell sofas, mattresses, patio sets or cabinets, that gap is your warning light going into Black Friday. Shoppers are spending, just not on the category you sell, and the next 45 days decide your fourth quarter.
Big-ticket buyers often want to talk before they pay. Put a real business number on your store so those calls and texts reach you instead of voicemail. Set up a business phone line with Quo →
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Furniture Slid Again While the Rest of Retail Kept Climbing
The October CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor landed on November 11. Total retail sales, which exclude auto dealers and gas stations, came in at $561.7 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis. That is up 0.15% from September and up 3.57% from October 2025, according to the NRF release.
Furniture and home furnishings did not share in that gain. The category fell 2.62% year over year. Electronics and appliances rose 9.3% over the same period, and sporting goods slipped 0.44%. The release did not report online and nonstore sales or building materials as separate figures, so those categories are not part of this comparison.
NRF President and CEO Matt Shay said retail sales edged higher in October “as a strong Halloween season and early winter holiday promotions pulled demand forward.” He also said retailers continue to offer promotions and value pricing to keep everyday items and holiday gifts affordable. The wording points to early promotions as part of the October lift, which matters if your own category waited for November.
This is the second month in a row furniture has printed a year-over-year decline in the Monitor. The September report, published October 8, put furniture and home furnishings down 2.7% year over year while total retail rose 4.05% and electronics and appliances rose 8.41%. Put the two months side by side and the pattern is steady. Total retail growth cooled from 4.05% to 3.57%, furniture stayed negative at roughly the same depth, and electronics kept growing at a strong clip.
For the holiday window itself, NRF’s October 15 forecast projects November and December retail sales growing 4.2% over 2025, for a total of $1.013 trillion. NRF defines the season as November 1 through December 31. NRF Chief Economist Mark Mathews said at the time that “we head into the holiday season with strong spending momentum, as consumers remain the bright spot in the economy.” Those are headline numbers for all retail, so they say little about what happens inside a single category like yours.
A note on what this data is. The CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor is built from anonymized credit and debit card transactions in the Affinity Solutions panel. The panel is weighted to match US Census demographics and then calibrated to the Census Bureau’s Monthly Retail Trade Survey at the category level. Ecommerce sales from store-based retailers, about 30% of the total, are assigned to their home categories. Online spending that cannot be tied to a category is reported separately as unallocated non-store sales. NRF also announced on October 19 that the panel now covers 120 million cards, up from a narrower cohort, which raises the gross monthly spending captured from roughly $8 billion to nearly $40 billion.
The Census Numbers Point the Other Way, and the Backdrop Explains Some of Why
There is a real counterpoint here and you should hold it next to the NRF figure. The Census Bureau’s advance estimate for September, released October 15, showed furniture and home furnishings stores at $10.696 billion, up 4.9% from $10.201 billion a year earlier. Nonstore retailers came in at $124.283 billion, up 8.2% from $114.879 billion. Electronics and appliance stores rose 9.4%. All of those are seasonally adjusted figures from the Census advance retail report.
Two things stand out. The Census figure covers September and the NRF figure covers October, so they are not the same month. The two sources also measure the category differently, since one counts sales at furniture stores and the other counts card spending assigned to furniture and home furnishings. The Census October report is scheduled for November 17 at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, and that release will show whether the two series are still moving apart.
The macro backdrop for big-ticket spending is mixed. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index jumped 7.5 points to 91.7 in October, but planned durable goods spending fell across the board on a six-month moving-average basis, and I covered the details in my consumer confidence breakdown. Plans for autos and homes declined slightly. The Conference Board’s own summary tied the confidence gain mainly to better views of current and expected business conditions.
Inflation is squeezing the household budget behind those plans. In my report on PCE inflation and real incomes, personal consumption inflation hit 3.6% while real incomes fell 0.3%. September CPI ran 3.7% year over year, with core CPI at 2.6%. A household that earns less in real terms than a year ago tends to push a $2,000 sectional down the list.
Prices on the product side are rising too. Whirlpool raised US appliance prices 7% in the fourth quarter, which I wrote up in my Whirlpool price increase post. Import duties on home goods are also on a schedule. Section 232 duties on upholstered wooden furniture and on completed kitchen cabinets and vanities sit at 25% now, and the scheduled step on January 1, 2027 takes upholstered furniture to 30% and cabinets and vanities to 50%, as I laid out in my cabinet and furniture tariff post. That increase depends on trade negotiations and has already been postponed once, so the date is not locked.
Financing is where the strongest signals sit. Synchrony reported record third-quarter purchase volume of $49.7 billion, up 8%, with its Home and Auto platform up 9%, and the company tied part of that to select furniture retailers. I summarized the release in my Synchrony Q3 post. On the retail side, Wayfair and Klarna announced 0% APR financing for up to six months across Wayfair, Joss and Main, AllModern and Birch Lane, which I covered in my Wayfair and Klarna post. The sources disagreed on whether that offer is always on or ends on a set date, so check the live terms before you use it as a benchmark.
Credit is about to get a little pricier. The Fed held its target at 3.75% to 4% on October 28 in a 10-2 vote, with two members preferring a quarter-point hike. Market odds for a December 9 hike ran between 71% and 85% across sources, and the prime rate sits at 7.00%. My Fed hike odds breakdown has the sources and dates. Nothing here is financial advice, and I am not a financial or legal advisor, so treat the rate numbers as reported information and check your own loan terms.
My Read: Shoppers Are Still Buying Furniture, Just Slower and Through Different Doors
My read is that the NRF number and the Census number are not in a fight. They are two different cameras pointed at the same room. The Monitor shows card dollars assigned to a category, and the Census shows sales at a defined set of businesses. Online-only sellers, which describes most stores in this niche, may not show up in the furniture line of either one in the way you would expect. This is my interpretation, not something either source states, so treat it as a working theory until the November 17 data comes in.
What I trust more than any single index is the direction of the signals together. Real incomes are down, durable goods plans are down, and the Fed is leaning toward a hike. Those three facts mean a shopper who might have bought a $3,000 dining set in a cheerful year now wants a reason to wait. Your job in the next six weeks is to remove those reasons, not to cut price and hope.
The financing data supports that. Synchrony’s Home and Auto volume grew 9% in a quarter when furniture sales in the Monitor were shrinking. My read is that the buyers who still convert are the ones who can spread the payment or who feel confident about delivery. If a competitor with deeper pockets is advertising 0% for six months, a store with no financing option looks expensive by comparison even at the same sticker price.
The electronics and appliance gain deserves its own note. Electronics and appliances rose 9.3% in the Monitor while Whirlpool pushed appliance prices up 7%. Some of that growth can come from higher prices rather than more units, and the sources do not break it out. I would not read it as proof that shoppers love big purchases again. I would read it as proof that shoppers are willing to pay for things they see as necessary, which is a useful lens for anything you sell that fixes a problem rather than decorates a room.
Delivery cost is a second squeeze. UPS posted 2027 changes effective December 21, including a residential surcharge rise from $6.50 to $7.10 and an average 5.9% general rate increase, which I detailed in my UPS 2027 surcharge post. Furniture usually ships freight, so parcel surcharges hit your accessories and small goods first. Forbes ran a piece today on how small retailers are rethinking free shipping this holiday season, and that tells me you are not the only one doing this math.
Hypothetical math, labeled as such. Say your store ships 1,000 residential parcels a month. A $0.60 residential surcharge increase adds $600 a month, or $7,200 a year, before the 5.9% base rate increase. If your parcel margin is thin, that single line can erase the profit on a few hundred orders. This is an illustration with made-up volume, so plug in your own order count.
Building and running a store that can absorb this kind of pressure takes systems, suppliers and a phone that gets answered. If you want a team to handle that for you, my turnkey done-for-you service builds the whole store with those pieces already in place.
Furniture is soft, but a well-built high-ticket store still converts. If you want my team to build and run it so you can stop guessing, here is the done-for-you option. See the turnkey done-for-you service →
What I’d Do Before Black Friday If I Sold Big-Ticket Home Goods
What I’d do first is look at who is actually buying. Open your Shopify analytics and pull October and November furniture orders by traffic source and by new versus returning customer. Move ad budget toward the sources that closed sales in the last 28 days and away from the ones that only generated traffic. In a soft category, recent proof beats last year’s averages.
Second, add a payment option at checkout if you do not have one. Whether it is a buy-now-pay-later plan or a lender-backed installment program, the point is to show a monthly figure next to the price on every product page above, say, $1,000. I cannot quote you terms because they vary by provider and credit profile, so get the current terms straight from the provider before you advertise anything. Do not promise 0% unless your provider confirms it in writing.
Third, cover the phone and chat. High-ticket buyers ask about delivery windows, assembly and returns before they pay. A business line through Quo catches the calls and texts. Live chat from Tidio catches the same questions on the site. Log every conversation in a CRM so nobody falls through the cracks.
Fourth, build a win-back flow for shoppers who browsed a furniture product and left. Three emails over ten days is enough. The first is a helpful reminder with delivery details, the second answers the top objection on that product, and the third offers financing information or a design consult. I covered the sequence structure in my email marketing flows guide. A tool like Omnisend can run it with email and SMS in one place.
Fifth, run the free-shipping math before you promise it. Take your last 90 days of orders, calculate the average shipping cost by order value band, and find the threshold where free shipping still leaves a healthy gross margin. If a $1,200 order carries a hypothetical 35% gross margin, that is $420 before ad costs, and a $150 freight charge is a third of your profit. Whatever number you land on, put it in writing on the product page so the shopper is not surprised at checkout.
Sixth, protect the money side. High order values make a single lost chargeback expensive, and one lost dispute on a $2,500 order hurts. Fraud and chargeback protection from ClearSale is worth pricing out before the rush, because adding it mid-November is a scramble. Keep holiday ad spend and your refund reserve in a separate business account, and a Mercury account is one clean way to do that.
Seventh, plan around the calendar. My high-ticket holiday calendar for 2026 lays out the dates that matter for high-ticket sellers. Mark November 17 for the Census October retail report, December 9 for the Fed decision, December 21 for the UPS changes and January 1 for the scheduled tariff step. If you sell upholstered furniture, cabinets or vanities, ask your suppliers now whether their landed costs will change, and think about whether pulling inventory forward makes sense. Duty depends on the entry date, not the order date, so an order placed in December does not by itself lock in today’s rate.
If you are still choosing what to sell, grab my free high-ticket niches list and compare categories that are growing against the ones that are shrinking. A soft category is not always a bad one, but you should enter it on purpose.
Work through a soft quarter with other store owners and me. The Ecommerce Paradise Academy on Skool has the full course library, member discussion and direct access to me. Start with the 7-day free trial. Join the Skool community →
Frequently Asked Questions
Did furniture sales really fall in October?
According to the CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor, furniture and home furnishings sales fell 2.62% year over year in October. The September report showed a 2.7% decline. Census data for September showed furniture stores up 4.9%, so the two sources disagree on the direction for the most recent month where both exist.
Why do the NRF and Census numbers differ?
The Monitor uses card transaction data weighted to Census demographics and calibrated to the Census retail survey. The Census report measures sales by type of business. They also cover different months in the figures I used. My read is that definitions and timing explain part of the gap, though neither source says so directly.
Should I cut prices on furniture right now?
I would not start there. With real incomes down and durable goods plans down, a smaller discount paired with financing details, delivery clarity and fast phone answers usually protects margin better than a blanket price cut. Test it on one product line first.
Will the furniture tariff really rise on January 1?
It is scheduled to, with upholstered furniture going from 25% to 30% and cabinets and vanities from 25% to 50%. The increase was already postponed once and depends on trade negotiations. Check my cabinet and furniture tariff post for the conditions and ask your supplier how they price landed cost.
What should I watch next?
The Census October advance retail report on November 17, the Fed decision on December 9, the UPS surcharge date of December 21 and the tariff date of January 1. If you want a plan for your specific store, you can book a discovery call with my team.
Where can I find high-ticket niches that are growing?
Start with my free niches list and sort by price and demand. Then look at supplier availability using my guide to finding suppliers before you commit to a category.
I wish you guys the best of luck this holiday season. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news coming through the day.
Related Articles
If you found this useful, these guides go deeper on related topics:
- Dropshipping Furniture in 2026: Suppliers, Freight and Safety Rules
- June Retail Sales Breakdown for High-Ticket Stores
- How to Set Up HubSpot
- How to Open a Mercury Account
- Your Payment Processor Is a Single Point of Failure
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and world traveler from Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
He maintains homes in Seattle and Bali, spends most of the year overseas, and usually returns to Seattle for about a month each summer.
