Big manufacturers are sweeping the home decoration market, and a fierce competition is unfolding on a trillion-dollar track.
Recently, JD.com has launched the “JD Self-operated Decoration” App, which is a comprehensive decoration product where users can purchase rough decoration, old house renovation, fine decoration, villa decoration and other services. The platform also provides free door-to-door measurement, apartment planning and quotation lists.
Not only JD.com, Alibaba Tmall also launched a one-stop pick-up App “Tmall Decoration Treasure” for B-end home decoration companies at the beginning of this year.
In fact, it has become a normal trend for major manufacturers to get involved in home decoration.
In addition to JD.com and Alibaba, Ant launched Alipay’s “Home Decoration Treasure” in November last year to solve the problem of special funds in the home decoration industry. In August last year, Kuaishou’s home decoration brand business Kuaishou Dream Home launched a national open recruitment plan for agent service providers to increase its focus on the home decoration track.
Different from early years when Internet platforms only made superficial attempts to match online home improvement information and sell simple building materials, this round of major manufacturers’ layout in the home improvement track is all two-way.
On the one hand, it launches C-end consumer services such as standardized renovation, old housing renovation, financial guarantee, and content explanation for ordinary owners. On the other hand, it opens digital tools, financial solutions, supply chain channels and traffic resources to offline decoration companies and building materials manufacturers to deeply serve the B-end market.
The trillion-dollar home decoration market is ushering in the entry of Internet giants. What exactly are these major companies looking for? Is the home decoration business really easy to do?
Home decoration is not a new track on the Internet. A few years ago, many major manufacturers, including Alibaba, JD.com, Byte, and Kuaishou, tried online sales of building materials and matching of decoration information, but most of them stayed in the light-asset model of attracting traffic online and undertaking offline decoration companies.
From the second half of 2025 to the present, leading Internet platforms have completely changed their style of play, and light and heavy assets have been launched simultaneously.
In May 2026, Tmall launched “Tmall Designer”, the bottom-level AI home decoration platform, and simultaneously launched offline experience stores. It integrated AI design tools, construction technology libraries, full-category building materials supply chains, construction site management and control systems and Alipay guaranteed transactions to launch complete decoration packages for consumers. At the same time, it opened digital tools to small and medium-sized decoration companies, positioning the “infrastructure” of the home decoration industry.
On this basis, we focus on the group purchase and decoration model of the community. Relying on Taobao and Tmall home decoration traffic, we gather owners of the same community to conduct centralized bargaining, compress the main material procurement and construction premiums, and solve the problem of retail households’ weak bargaining power in decoration.
In September 2025, Alipay officially launched the home improvement treasure fund custody business. In just two months, dozens of regional leading decoration companies such as Chongqing Thangka, Guizhou Xibinian, Hangzhou Dudu Decoration, and Chuangyi Decoration completed signings and access. This is a brand new home decoration consumption model.
In the past, it was common in the decoration industry to pay the full amount in advance and then the decoration companies ran away with the money. Jiajianbao implements a “node acceptance, segmented loan” mechanism. Only after the owner confirms that water, electricity, mud wood, paint, and completion of each step of the construction are qualified, the escrow funds will be allocated to the decoration company, avoiding financial risks from the transaction link.
The two major content platforms, Byte and Kuaishou, are also iterating their home decoration business layout.
In terms of Byte, its home improvement platform Zhuxiaobang incubated the self-operated decoration brand Zhuhaojia in the early years, and deeply entered the offline decoration and fulfillment contract. However, due to the adjustment of its business strategy, Zhuhaojia stopped signing new decoration orders, abandoned asset-heavy self-operated construction, and relied on Douyin traffic to transform into home decoration content services. At the same time, Zhuxiaobang was integrated into the Douyin life service system, linking local lifestyle merchants to deeply develop home decoration in the same city.
Kuaishou has made even more radical changes. In August last year, its home decoration brand Kuaishou Zhumengjia launched an open recruitment for national agent service providers, and quickly entered the home decoration market in third- and fourth-tier cities. This year, it continued to increase its focus on home decoration live broadcasts and local decoration group buying business. It relied on short video traffic to harvest customers interested in home decoration, and improved the closed loop from content acquisition to offline transactions.
Completely opposite to the light platform logic of Alibaba, Byte, Kuaishou, and Ant, JD.com has focused on “self-operation and heavy delivery” in its home decoration layout in the past year. It is also the player with the heaviest investment and the most complete home decoration ecology among all major manufacturers.
JD.com Home Decoration was founded in 2010 and has served more than 200,000 households in the past ten years. It is one of the few large chain directly-operated home decoration brands in the country.
JD.com has built tens of thousands of square meters of warehouses to realize unified centralized procurement and distribution of main materials.
In May 2025, JD.com’s self-operated home decoration offline flagship store opened in Beijing, simultaneously launching its own building materials brands such as Jingpin Doors and Windows, Jingyue Warm; in June of the same year, it completed the acquisition of the chain decoration company Sichuan Life Home, directly acquiring the offline stores and construction network covering 126 cities, and making up for the shortcomings of offline delivery; in August, it reached an in-depth cooperation with IKEA to open up integrated services of IKEA design and JD.com delivery and installation.
In March this year, JD.com launched the “AI Smart Home Decoration” brand, using its own JoyAI large model to generate whole-house decoration plans and build an industrialized delivery platform.
At present, JD.com directly manages more than 5,200 industrial workers covering ten major types of work, breaking the traditional decoration model of “contracting workers and subcontracting”.
In addition, on the supply chain side, JD.com has also established a professional procurement and sales team of more than 500 people.
JD.com has simultaneously launched offline channels. JD.com Home Decoration has fully entered JD.MALL across the country and plans to cover 30 cities in 2026.
During the June 18th holiday this year, the company released a strategy to renovate its bureau, aiming at the partial renovation market of old houses. It cooperated with the architectural design institute to launch a renovation plan suitable for the elderly. It also launched renovation protection insurance with 0 interest installments and up to one million yuan, covering the two core needs of new house renovation and old house renovation.
Large manufacturers have stepped up their efforts in home decoration in the past year, and this is not without purpose.
In the past, the home improvement industry was highly tied to the delivery of new homes, but now that the real estate market has entered the era of inventory, renovation of old homes, partial renovation, and refurbishing of second-hand homes have become mainstream market demands.
According to data from the “China Home Decoration Development Report”, the overall scale of China’s home furnishing market will reach about 5 trillion yuan in 2025, and is expected to reach 7 trillion yuan in 2030.
The release of demand for renovation of existing housing will replace the new housing market as the main market for home furnishings.
“Unlike home appliances, 3C and other mature e-commerce categories that have peaked in growth, home decoration is a low-frequency consumption with high customer unit price. The consumption of complete decoration for a single household is generally 150,000-300,000 yuan, and the order for office renovation can also reach tens of thousands of yuan. The market volume is much larger than most vertical consumer goods tracks,” an analyst pointed out.
At the same time, home decoration is the “entry to home consumption.” For example, after the decoration is completed, subsequent consumption of furniture, home appliances, smart homes, soft furnishings, housekeeping, etc. will be released. In fact, capturing home decoration traffic is equivalent to locking in full-cycle household consumption for a long time, which is the core appeal of major manufacturers.
In addition, the decoration industry has long suffered from four serious problems: lack of standardization, opaque prices, insecure funds, and difficulty in construction control.
Layers of subcontracting lead to increased prices for additional items and shoddy materials.
After owners pay large sums in advance, small and medium-sized clothing companies frequently break their capital chains and run away.
There is no unified standard for the construction process, and there is no main body for after-sales rights protection.
And major Internet companies can just make up for these shortcomings.
For example, the fund custody of Alipay Home Decoration Bao can solve the trust problem.
JD.com’s mature supply chain system reduces material costs, unifies quality control, AI design, and online construction site monitoring enable full process visualization, and the platform provides unified after-sales guarantees. Compared with small and medium-sized local decoration companies, it has brand trust endorsement.
For ordinary consumers, entering the decoration industry on the platform of a large factory can avoid the risk of competing with small decoration workshops, and market acceptance continues to increase.
The trillion-dollar home decoration market is one of the few physical tracks where major Internet companies still have room for growth. The demand for existing renovations, the trust gap in the industry, and the entry value of household consumption have jointly promoted the continued expansion of major players such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Ant.
This round of entry of major manufacturers is no longer simply about attracting traffic online, but is about restructuring industry rules in an all-round way from capital, supply chain, construction, and digitalization, which is expected to gradually solve the long-standing chaos in the industry.
However, the underlying characteristics of non-standard home decoration, heavy delivery, low gross profit, and regional dispersion have not changed. Whether it is the entry of light assets such as Alibaba, or the self-operation of JD.com, heavy assets, long-term continuous investment is required, and it is difficult to achieve large-scale profits in the short term.
In the future, there will not be a dominant situation in the home decoration field. Leading Internet platforms, national chain decoration companies, and regional local decoration companies will coexist for a long time. The industry reshuffle cycle has just begun.
For consumers, the entry of large manufacturers will bring more transparent and safe decoration choices. For industry practitioners, digitalization and standardized transformation will become the only way to survive.
