Home Improvement Retail Trends for Black Friday/Cyber Monday

The four days from Black Fri­day to Cyber Mon­day are a crit­i­cal peri­od for retail. Across Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ama­zon, our data shows dou­ble-dig­it year-over-year sales growth in 2020 and 2021, up +12% and 11% respectively. 

From 2022 to 2024, sales across these three retail­ers have slowed with our data indi­cat­ing sin­gle-dig­it YoY growth. Dur­ing BFCM 2024, Ama­zon led from a growth per­spec­tive, dri­ven by strong per­for­mance with­in Décor, Appli­ances, and Tools. Décor account­ed for more than one third of Ama­zon’s BFCM sales with­in the five key home improve­ment cat­e­gories high­light­ed below. 

Amazon’s suc­cess in Décor was pri­mar­i­ly dri­ven by shop­pers pur­chas­ing Sea­son­al & Hol­i­day Dec­o­ra­tions, but the depart­ment also achieved sig­nif­i­cant gains in non-sea­son­al cat­e­gories such as Rugs and Win­dow Treatments.

*Home Décor includes core (Win­dow Treat­ments & Acces­sories, Rugs, etc.) and sea­son­al décor (Sea­son­al & Hol­i­day Décor)
*Appli­ances includes major (Refrig­er­a­tors, dish­wash­ers, washer/​dryers, etc.), minor (Range hoods, vac­u­ums, etc.), and house­hold appli­ances (Water heaters, etc.)

To bet­ter under­stand poten­tial pric­ing influ­ences dur­ing BFCM, we ana­lyzed aver­age item dis­count trends. Our data shows that Ama­zon applied the great­est mark­downs, fol­lowed by Lowe’s 6 per­cent­age points below Amazon’s aver­age across three key categories.

*Dis­count %: (Full Price Esti­mate — Trans­act­ed price) / (Full Price Esti­mate). The high­er the num­ber, the greater the dis­count.
*Full Price Esti­mate: Yip­it­Data’s best esti­mate of the orig­i­nal MSRP based on the trans­act­ed price of the item. We take the 90th per­centile price from all
pre­vi­ous trans­ac­tions and the 90th per­centile price from the last 100 obser­va­tions. We select the high­er of these two val­ues as the FPE.

Tools emerged as Amazon’s third high­est-grow­ing home improve­ment cat­e­go­ry dur­ing BFCM 2024. To bet­ter under­stand the dri­vers behind this suc­cess, we ana­lyzed shop­per leak­age data, focus­ing on the top Tools brands that con­vert­ed shoppers. 

Based on this view, we can see that for­mer Home Depot and Lowe’s Tools cus­tomers were dri­ven to Ama­zon for the Dewalt brand. The top item these cus­tomers switched to Ama­zon to pur­chase was the 20V MAX Cord­less Drill and Impact Dri­ver, Pow­er Tool Com­bo Kit with 2 Bat­ter­ies and Charg­er (DCK240C2).

The pro cus­tomer plays a key role in the home improve­ment indus­try and its growth. To dive into their shop­ping behav­iors dur­ing BFCM, we exam­ined top tools brands they favored dur­ing the pro­mo­tion­al time frame as well as brand share changes ver­sus YTD 2024 with­in our pro panel. 

Mil­wau­kee saw sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in its share among pro cus­tomers dur­ing BFCM, dri­ven by demand for high-per­for­mance tools. Pros grav­i­tat­ed towards kits that includ­ed 8.0 or 12.0 Ah bat­ter­ies, show­cas­ing a pref­er­ence for pow­er and efficiency.

*A ​“PRO” pan­elist is defined as an indi­vid­ual that uti­lizes the Pro Desk to make a spe­cial bulk order at Home Depot OR has spent at least $6,000 in con­sec­u­tive years on Home Improve­ment materials.

Over­all, our BFCM data high­lights key trends: cus­tomers pri­or­i­tiz­ing the best deals, mak­ing last-minute pur­chas­es for hol­i­day readi­ness, and shop­ping brands they know and trust. These insights empha­size the crit­i­cal impor­tance of com­pet­i­tive pric­ing, tar­get­ed pro­mo­tions, and brand loy­al­ty in dri­ving suc­cess dur­ing this essen­tial retail period. 

Today’s con­tent focused sole­ly on Black Fri­day through Cyber Mon­day. For fur­ther insight into how pro­mo­tions are impact­ing the home improve­ment space, reg­is­ter for our upcom­ing webi­nar with HIRI on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 23rd. 

Interested in learning more about home improvement growth opportunities? 

Read YipitData’s blog on under­stand­ing Home Improve­ment Shop­per Behav­ior or con­nect with a Yip­it­Da­ta ana­lyst today! 

About YipitData

With over 205MM home improve­ment data points annu­al­ly, Yip­it­Da­ta has cov­er­age across 8k dis­tinct brands and key retail­ers, includ­ing Home Depot and Lowe’s, giv­ing you the vis­i­bil­i­ty you need to make bet­ter busi­ness deci­sions. Our pro­pri­etary approach com­bines data (physical/​email receipt, cc, web-scraped, etc) with pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing to give you the most accu­rate and gran­u­lar read on your mar­ket per­for­mance with only 7 – 10 days of lag.