The head of Wayfair attributed its large revenue gain in the fourth quarter to a significant increase in customers and a successful Cyber Weekend in 2015. Wayfair generated $740 million in net revenue for the quarter, up 81% year-over-year.
“For the five day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, direct retail growth sales which is defined as order intake, increased 130% year over year,” said Niraj Shah, co-founder, CEO and co-chairman of Wayfair During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
In fact, Wayfair’s direct business, which is now 93% of total net revenue, grew 98% to $686 million in the quarter, compared to 2014.
Shah said the brand added more customers than ever before, ending the quarter with 5.4 million of them, up 67% from 2014.
For the full year, Wayfair grew net revenue 71% and added over two million net new customers, while growing orders from repeat customers by 96%. Revenue per active customer grew by 11%.
“We strengthened our relationships with our suppliers, maintaining our balance sheet inventory position flat while growing our range of exclusive product, our private label offering and growing our business,” said Shah.
Wayfair saw strength throughout the holiday period. Promotions started earlier in the holiday season, with the first events beginning October 1.
“This allowed us to take advantage of early shopping that our customer does to prepare a home for the holiday season, and it allowed us time to refine our offering in response to customer demand as the quarter progressed,” Shah said. “In total, we featured approximately 68,000 items across different merchandising programs which ranged from editorial content, to functional solutions, to curated seasonal décor.”
Looking forward, Wayfair plans to continue to build out its logistics network, offering more two-day deliveries while improving speed and efficiency across the network.
“These improvements to our offering and customer experience allowed us to successfully take advantage of the secular shift to online, resulting in significant share gain,” said Shah.
Steve Conine, co-founder and co-chairman of Wayfair, said the company has spent 14 years developing customized technology to meet the unique needs of the home market, from front-end innovations like personalization, search, mobile web and apps to its supplier interface, advertising stack and logistics network.
“Our systems are largely homegrown and developed utilizing our scale and proprietary data to build the best tools to serve our suppliers and customers,” Conine said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Wayfair announced the launch of its brand new catalog, featuring furniture and home decor. The catalog, “Explore the Great Outdoors” will bring online and offline together for an increasingly immersive shopping experience. See what other plans are in place for the new catalog.
-Daniela Forte is Multichannel Merchant’s Content Producer