ITALY – The first CSIL report focused on e-commerce was published in November 2001. There were 418 million internet users in the year 2000, this was about 5 years after Jeff Bezos delivered from his garage the very first book ever sold from the newly born Amazon platform.

The appearance of the first e-commerce stores dates back to 1994/1995, with Amazon and eBay as first comers, other milestones were at the end of the century the start of online payment systems like Paypal and the launch of Alibaba in 1999 in 2012 finally overtook U.S. e-commerce giants turnover and set the Asian leadership in the e-commerce field, with China rising as the world’s largest e-commerce market in the world.

The following milestones were off course the smartphone revolution together with the social media one, Facebook birth is dated 2004, the first mobile transaction was made in 2008, in 2011 Google launched the wallet payment app, in 2011 the first social sponsored stories for advertisement were launched by Facebook and finally in 2017 Instagram introduces shoppable tags – concluding the social media metamorphosis in real e-commerce platform by 2020.

In about 2 decades the number of internet users grew from about 418 million to over 4 billion with online sales reaching 5,7 trillion USD from only 50 billion in the year 2000.

According to CSIL’s latest observatory (E-commerce for the furniture industry), the global value of furniture sold online is worth about USD 96 billion, representing about 11% of the worldwide furniture consumption at end-user prices, it was estimated to only 1% back in the year 2000.

The United States is now the largest single e-commerce marketplace in value, China follows, while Europe as a whole is ranking third. However, the penetration rate of e-commerce on furniture consumption is higher in North America (15%), followed by Asia-Pacific (11%) and Europe (10%).

While global consumption of furniture decreased on average by 3% in 2022/2019, e-commerce consumption increased by +18% as a yearly average for the same years. A booming performance of online sales has been registered in 2020 and 2021, while in 2022 the trend has been substantially flat.

Consumers have grown accustomed to an almost unlimited choice that they can access online, from anywhere, at any time. And they expect a seamless experience that is joined up between physical stores, online, or phone, and where they can switch among channels easily. This has rewritten the rules of traditional retailing.