Wayfair grows 7.4% and wins back customers in a shrinking category

Wayfair posted first-quarter 2026 net revenue of $2.9 billion, up 7.4% or $201 million year over year, and reported that its active customer base returned to growth for the first time in years. The results, announced April 30, stand out against a home category that government data shows is still shrinking.

The numbers behind the quarter

US net revenue rose 7.5% to $2.6 billion, with international revenue up 6.0% to $319 million. Active customers reached 21.4 million, up 1.4%, while revenue per customer over the trailing twelve months climbed 5.2% to $591. Orders delivered rose 3.3% to 9.4 million at an average order value of $312, repeat customers placed 79.8% of all orders, and 64.7% of orders came through mobile. Gross profit landed at $880 million, an even 30% of revenue. The composition of the growth matters as much as the headline: more customers, each ordering slightly more often, at higher average spend. That is broad-based demand capture, not a one-off promotion spike or a single category running hot.

Profitability moved the same direction as the top line. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $151 million versus $106 million a year earlier, a 5.2% margin that CEO Niraj Shah called the best first-quarter result in five years, and non-GAAP adjusted diluted earnings per share reached $0.26. The company still recorded a $105 million net loss under GAAP, a reminder that the turnaround is measured in trajectory rather than arrival; RapidRatings, the financial-health rating firm, was still classing Wayfair in its high-risk category as recently as March, according to Retail Dive. The trajectory test now is whether the EBITDA improvement holds through quarters without a demand tailwind, because the category is not supplying one.

Shah framed the quarter as share capture, saying Wayfair ran at a high-single-digit spread above the category's underlying trend and that its share-gain momentum is accelerating. The claim is plausible against the backdrop: US Census Bureau data showed furniture and home furnishings store sales down 3.6% year over year in April, according to Home News Now, and home has been among the weakest major retail categories all year. A platform growing 7.4% inside a category shrinking 3.6% is taking roughly an 11-point spread out of someone else's sales.

Concentration, not recovery

Wayfair's quarter is less a signal of category recovery than of concentration. With housing turnover frozen and big-ticket discretionary spending under pressure, overall demand is flat to down, yet the largest online home platform is growing high-single-digits while returning to customer growth. The arithmetic means someone else is shrinking: mostly the long tail of independent stores and weaker chains, several of which have filed for bankruptcy or liquidated over the past year. Retail Dive's industry coverage this spring carried the blunt summary from Emarketer analyst Zak Stambor that the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, and this quarter is what that looks like in numbers. The repeat-order figure is the structural part: when nearly four in five orders come from existing customers, share gains compound instead of churning away.

The result also fits the pattern in our own coverage of the frozen housing market: 2026 is a share-gain year, not a demand-growth year, and the gap between channels that are winning and channels that are bleeding is widening every quarter.

Why it matters: For furniture and home brands, channel allocation is becoming a bet on where the surviving demand consolidates. Platforms that are demonstrably gaining share, Wayfair among them alongside the big marketplaces, are where assortment, content, and pricing investment pays back; channels losing share return less on the same effort each quarter. The mobile and repeat-purchase numbers also say the winning platforms own the customer relationship, which raises the stakes on being well-positioned inside them.

What it means for our partners: A presence on the platforms taking share, executed with sharp pricing and reliable big-and-bulky fulfillment, is how a brand rides concentration instead of being a casualty of it.