What are the key sales KPIs for the Big-Box Home Improvement Retail industry in 2027?

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Direct Answer

The nine KPIs that actually run a big-box home improvement retailer in 2027 are: Comparable Sales Growth %, Average Ticket Size ($), Transactions (year-over-year %), Pro vs. DIY Customer Mix %, E-Commerce Penetration %, Installation/Services Revenue ($B), Gross Margin %, Inventory Turnover (turns/year), and Storm-Recovery Sales Bump (basis points).

Together they answer the three questions every home-improvement CFO faces: is the U.S. Housing cycle giving or taking, is the Pro book of business growing faster than DIY is decaying, and is the supply chain levered for lumber-price volatility without bleeding margin.

TL;DR
— Home Depot posted $164.7B in FY2025 net sales with comp sales modestly positive at +0.6% in Q1 FY2026; Lowe's came in at $86.3B with the same +0.6% Q1 comp and 15.5% online sales growth. Pro now represents roughly 30-40% of revenue at the leaders and is the only segment growing meaningfully.
Gross margin holds near 33% and inventory turns at 4.4x — anything weaker for two quarters signals a structural problem, not a cyclical one. Track the nine KPIs weekly, re-baseline the Pro mix every 30 days, and re-forecast lumber/commodity exposure every 60 days.

Why Big-Box Home Improvement Works Differently

Big-box home improvement is not general merchandise retail even though it shares the warehouse format. Four mechanics make the category its own operating model.

Project-driven, not basket-driven. A Home Depot or Lowe's transaction is almost never a one-SKU impulse buy — it is the third trip of a five-trip project, where the customer comes back for the missing fitting, the second box of tile, or the right paint sheen. Same-store comp gets driven less by traffic than by project completion rate, which the leaders track via Pro-loyalty cards and BOPIS pickup data.

Break the project (out-of-stock SKU, wrong delivery window) and the project moves to the competitor inside one weekend.

Pro-vs-DIY two-engine economics. The DIY shopper visits 3-5 times a year and spends $80-$120 per ticket. The Pro contractor visits 60-100 times a year and spends $400-$1,200 per ticket, with multi-day delivery and credit terms. Home Depot's Pro initiative — built around the SRS Distribution acquisition, dedicated job-site fulfillment, and trade credit — is intentionally a higher-CAC, higher-LTV book.

Lowe's reports Pro Services has moved from ~20% of sales in 2018 to roughly 30% in early 2026, and Pro revenue is now a stated 40% of total. The two customer types share a store but require completely different inventory, labor, and CRM motions.

Macro housing-cycle sensitivity. Existing-home turnover, mortgage rates, and homeowner equity drive 60-70% of comp sales variance. When 30-year mortgage rates push above 7%, existing-home transactions slow, and the move-driven big-ticket projects (kitchen, bath, flooring) compress.

Lowe's Q1 FY2026 guide of flat-to-+2% comps reflects the soft-housing scenario. Operators cannot move housing turnover, but they can shift the slate toward repair-and-maintenance projects that happen regardless of interest rates.

Commodity and storm-recovery shock exposure. Lumber, copper, and steel collectively run 15-20% of COGS, and prices swing 30-50% inside a quarter. Hurricane and storm seasons inject 50-200 basis points of comp into Florida, Texas, and Carolina stores for 6-12 weeks. The CFO question is never "what were comps" — it is "what were comps adjusted for lumber price and storm-recovery contribution."

The 9 KPIs, In Depth

1. Comparable Sales Growth %. The headline number Wall Street trades on. Home Depot and Lowe's both posted +0.6% comps in Q1 FY2026 — the fourth consecutive positive quarter for Lowe's after the 2023-2024 housing reset.

Always reported with and without lumber price impact, and split into traffic versus ticket. Anything negative for two consecutive quarters triggers a slate and labor reset.

2. Average Ticket Size ($). Home Depot's average ticket rose 1.4% in fiscal 2025 with big-ticket transactions over $1,000 up 1.3% in Q4. Ticket is the cleanest signal on project size — when ticket grows but transactions shrink, the customer is consolidating purchase cycles; when both shrink, demand is genuinely soft.

3. Transactions (year-over-year %). Home Depot transactions declined 1.0% in fiscal 2025. The trade-off between ticket and traffic is the executive conversation every quarter, and the operating teams obsess over Pro transaction frequency (visits per active Pro per month) as the leading indicator.

4. Pro vs. DIY Customer Mix %. Home Depot does not publish the exact split but disclosed in FY26 commentary that Pro comps outperformed DIY. Lowe's reports Pro is roughly 30-40% of revenue. The strategic question is the trajectory — Pro should be growing 2-4x faster than DIY for the next three years, otherwise the long-term growth story breaks.

5. E-Commerce Penetration %. Lowe's posted 15.5% online sales growth in Q1 FY26; Home Depot crossed 10%+ online comp for the fourth straight quarter. Online is roughly 15-18% of total sales at both chains, with BOPIS (buy-online-pickup-in-store) and ship-from-store fulfillment carrying most of the volume. Pure ship-to-home is ~3-5% of sales.

6. Installation/Services Revenue ($B). Lowe's June 2025 acquisition of Artisan Design Group added 132 facilities, 3,200 installers, and a builder/multifamily channel. Home Depot's HD Supply and SRS Distribution units do the same for Pro.

Services revenue (installed roofing, flooring, kitchen, HVAC) carries higher gross margin than product alone and locks the customer in for the next project.

7. Gross Margin %. Home Depot reported FY2025 gross margin of approximately 33.3%, down 10 basis points year-over-year. Lowe's runs slightly above 33%. The 10-30 bp annual movement is the executive scorecard — sustained 50+ bp compression signals either lumber pressure, Pro mix dilution, or shrink rising.

8. Inventory Turnover (turns/year). Home Depot ended FY2025 at 4.4 turns. Lowe's runs slightly lower at 3.6-3.8. The turn metric matters most during deflation — when lumber prices fall, slow-turning inventory has to be marked down. Operators flexed working-capital management hard in 2023-2024 to absorb the lumber unwind.

9. Storm-Recovery Sales Bump (basis points). Hurricane Helene contributed an estimated 50-100 basis points to Home Depot comps in Q3 FY24; FY2025 hurricane season was milder. The leaders model hurricane probability into the regional plan and pre-position generators, tarps, plywood, and pumps 7-10 days ahead of landfall.

Storm bumps reverse out 2-3 quarters later as the recovery-spend cycle completes.

flowchart TD A[Housing Macro Inputs] --> B{Mortgage Rate + Existing-Home Turnover} B -->|Soft| C[DIY Repair-Maintenance Mix Grows] B -->|Strong| D[Big-Ticket Project Mix Grows] C --> E[Comparable Sales Growth] D --> E E --> F{Pro vs DIY Split} F -->|Pro 30-40%| G[High Ticket + High Frequency] F -->|DIY 60-70%| H[Lower Ticket + Lower Frequency] G --> I[Services Attach: Install + Delivery] H --> J[BOPIS + Ship-from-Store] I --> K[Gross Margin %] J --> K K --> L[Inventory Turns] L --> M[Reinvest in Pro Tools + Digital + Distribution] M --> A N[Storm Events] -.->|50-200 bps| E

Real Operators

Home Depot is the category leader at $164.7B in FY2025 net sales, ~2,350 U.S. Stores, and a Pro engine reinforced by SRS Distribution (roofing, building materials, and exterior products) acquired in 2024. Lowe's runs ~1,750 U.S.

Stores at $86.3B FY2025 revenue and is executing its "Total Home" strategy with Artisan Design Group bringing 3,200 installers in-house. Menards is the third national big-box at ~350 stores across the Midwest, privately held, with strong lumber and building-materials share. Ace Hardware (cooperative) runs ~5,500 mostly franchised small-format stores that serve the convenience-and-fix-it niche the big boxes underweight.

True Value is the smaller hardware cooperative competitor. Tractor Supply is the rural-and-ranch adjacent format at ~2,300 stores doing roughly $15B revenue, capturing the agricultural Pro the big boxes do not serve. Floor & Decor is the specialty flooring deep-dive disruptor at ~245 stores.

The Sherwin-Williams Paint Stores Group competes for the Pro painter wallet. 84 Lumber is the privately held pro-only lumber-and-building-materials competitor that serves residential contractors. Builders FirstSource is the largest pro-only LBM supplier at ~$17B revenue, an indirect competitor for the Home Depot/Lowe's Pro book.

Failure Modes

The four that kill big-box home improvement P&Ls. (1) Pro investment without operational redesign — opening Pro desks but not changing the morning-replenishment cadence, job-site delivery SLAs, or trade credit terms; Pro frequency stalls and the CAC is wasted. (2) Comp-sales optical management — chasing ticket through promotional bundling instead of growing traffic, masking 2-3 quarters of underlying decline.

(3) Lumber-deflation working-capital trap — failing to mark-to-market inventory as lumber prices unwind, then taking a one-time gross-margin charge that lands in the same quarter as a Pro mix-shift dilution. (4) Storm-recovery double-counting — booking the hurricane-comp bump as run-rate growth and missing the reversal in the comparable quarter twelve months later.

Reporting Cadence

Daily: comp sales by region, transactions, ticket, BOPIS/online fulfillment SLA, big-ticket order count. Weekly: Pro versus DIY mix by region, lumber commodity index, e-commerce comp growth, inventory in-stock %, services backlog. Monthly: gross margin by department, inventory turns by category, Pro loyalty active rate, services revenue and attach rate, shrink metrics.

Quarterly: full P&L, Pro mix trajectory, storm-recovery contribution decomposition, SRS/ADG integration progress, capital allocation review for the board and earnings call.

flowchart TD A[Daily Store + Online Telemetry] --> B[Comp + Ticket + Transactions + BOPIS SLA] B --> C[Weekly Pro-DIY Operating Review] C --> D[Pro Mix + Lumber Index + Services Backlog + In-Stock %] D --> E[Monthly Business Review] E --> F[Gross Margin + Turns + Loyalty Active + Services Attach] F --> G[Quarterly Earnings + Board] G --> H[Full P&L + Storm Bump + Integration + Capital] H --> I[Re-forecast Pro Pipeline + Commodity + Services Capacity] I --> A

30/60/90 Day Plan

Days 1–30: instrument the nine KPIs at store, region, and channel grain. Reconcile comp-sales reporting between merchandising and finance — they will not match on first pull because of returns timing, services billing, and Pro credit-terms revenue recognition. Baseline Pro versus DIY mix by region using the loyalty-card data and dial in the lumber-index sensitivity model for the trailing eight quarters.

Days 31–60: ship the Pro frequency dashboard. Tie loyalty-card data against job-site delivery, trade-credit utilization, and BOPIS Pro orders. Identify the bottom-quartile regions on Pro frequency and brief the regional operations leaders.

Stand up the storm-recovery playbook with pre-position SKU lists for the Atlantic and Gulf coast regions in time for hurricane season.

Days 61–90: run the first quarterly services-attach reset. Model installation revenue against product sales for kitchen, flooring, and roofing; identify the bottom-quartile categories on attach and brief the merchandising team. Refresh the lumber commodity hedging and inventory-position model.

Present the operating model with monthly checkpoints to the CFO and a five-year housing-cycle scenario.

FAQ

How do you separate lumber price impact from underlying comp? Both Home Depot and Lowe's footnote disclose lumber's contribution to comp variance. Subtract the commodity-driven basis points from headline comp to get the operating comp; the gap between the two is the cleanest signal of whether merchants or macro is moving the number.

What is the right Pro mix target? 40% is the stretch target for the leaders by 2028 and the directional point of the SRS Distribution and Artisan Design Group acquisitions. Below 25% means the operator is still essentially a DIY retailer with a Pro counter, not a Pro-first commercial business.

Is e-commerce really 15%+ of sales? Yes, but the definition matters. Most of that volume is BOPIS or ship-from-store — the customer transacted online but the order fulfilled out of a physical store. Pure ship-to-home from a distribution center is roughly 3-5% of sales, and that is where the operating-margin pressure sits.

How do you treat storm-recovery quarters? Always disclose the storm-driven basis points in the earnings release and exclude them from forward-comp guidance. Failing to do that creates an artificial deceleration narrative the following year that takes 3-4 quarters to wash through.

Sources

The Home Depot, Inc. — Form 10-K (FY2025) and Q1 FY2026 Earnings Release
Lowe's Companies, Inc. — Form 10-K (FY2025) and Q1 FY2026 8-K filings
Lowe's Companies, Inc. — 2025 Annual Report (Artisan Design Group acquisition disclosure)
Hardware Retailing Magazine — Big-Box and Independent Hardware Reporting
North American Hardware and Paint Association (NHPA) — Industry Performance Reports
IBISWorld — Home Improvement Stores in the U.S. Industry Report
U.S. Census Bureau — Building Materials and Garden Equipment Dealers Annual Retail Trade Survey
Joint Center for Housing Studies (Harvard) — Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA)
Random Lengths and Fastmarkets — Lumber and Building-Materials Price Indices
SRS Distribution and Builders FirstSource — Pro-Channel Competitive Filings

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### Direct Answer

The nine KPIs that actually run a big-box home improvement retailer in 2027 are: **Comparable Sales Growth %**, **Average Ticket Size ($)**, **Transactions (year-over-year %)**, **Pro vs. DIY Customer Mix %**, **E-Commerce Penetration %**, **Installation/Services Revenue ($B)**, **Gross Margin %**, **Inventory Turnover (turns/year)**, and **Storm-Recovery Sales Bump (basis points)**. Together they answer the three questions every home-improvement CFO faces: is the U.S. Housing cycle giving or taking, is the Pro book of business growing faster than DIY is decaying, and is the supply chain levered for lumber-price volatility without bleeding margin.

> **TL;DR** — Home Depot posted $164.7B in FY2025 net sales with comp sales modestly positive at +0.6% in Q1 FY2026; Lowe's came in at $86.3B with the same +0.6% Q1 comp and 15.5% online sales growth. Pro now represents roughly 30-40% of revenue at the leaders and is the only segment growing meaningfully. Gross margin holds near 33% and inventory turns at 4.4x — anything weaker for two quarters signals a structural problem, not a cyclical one. Track the nine KPIs weekly, re-baseline the Pro mix every 30 days, and re-forecast lumber/commodity exposure every 60 days.

## Why Big-Box Home Improvement Works Differently

Big-box home improvement is not general merchandise retail even though it shares the warehouse format. Four mechanics make the category its own operating model.

**Project-driven, not basket-driven.** A Home Depot or Lowe's transaction is almost never a one-SKU impulse buy — it is the third trip of a five-trip project, where the customer comes back for the missing fitting, the second box of tile, or the right paint sheen. Same-store comp gets driven less by traffic than by **project completion rate**, which the leaders track via Pro-loyalty cards and BOPIS pickup data. Break the project (out-of-stock SKU, wrong delivery window) and the project moves to the competitor inside one weekend.

**Pro-vs-DIY two-engine economics.** The DIY shopper visits 3-5 times a year and spends $80-$120 per ticket. The Pro contractor visits 60-100 times a year and spends $400-$1,200 per ticket, with multi-day delivery and credit terms. Home Depot's Pro initiative — built around the SRS Distribution acquisition, dedicated job-site fulfillment, and trade credit — is intentionally a higher-CAC, higher-LTV book. Lowe's reports Pro Services has moved from ~20% of sales in 2018 to roughly 30% in early 2026, and Pro revenue is now a stated 40% of total. The two customer types share a store but require completely different inventory, labor, and CRM motions.

**Macro housing-cycle sensitivity.** Existing-home turnover, mortgage rates, and homeowner equity drive 60-70% of comp sales variance. When 30-year mortgage rates push above 7%, existing-home transactions slow, and the move-driven big-ticket projects (kitchen, bath, flooring) compress. Lowe's Q1 FY2026 guide of flat-to-+2% comps reflects the soft-housing scenario. Operators cannot move housing turnover, but they can shift the slate toward repair-and-maintenance projects that happen regardless of interest rates.

**Commodity and storm-recovery shock exposure.** Lumber, copper, and steel collectively run 15-20% of COGS, and prices swing 30-50% inside a quarter. Hurricane and storm seasons inject 50-200 basis points of comp into Florida, Texas, and Carolina stores for 6-12 weeks. The CFO question is never "what were comps" — it is "what were comps adjusted for lumber price and storm-recovery contribution."

## The 9 KPIs, In Depth

**1. Comparable Sales Growth %.** The headline number Wall Street trades on. Home Depot and Lowe's both posted +0.6% comps in Q1 FY2026 — the fourth consecutive positive quarter for Lowe's after the 2023-2024 housing reset. Always reported with and without lumber price impact, and split into traffic versus ticket. Anything negative for two consecutive quarters triggers a slate and labor reset.

**2. Average Ticket Size ($).** Home Depot's average ticket rose 1.4% in fiscal 2025 with big-ticket transactions over $1,000 up 1.3% in Q4. Ticket is the cleanest signal on project size — when ticket grows but transactions shrink, the customer is consolidating purchase cycles; when both shrink, demand is genuinely soft.

**3. Transactions (year-over-year %).** Home Depot transactions declined 1.0% in fiscal 2025. The trade-off between ticket and traffic is the executive conversation every quarter, and the operating teams obsess over Pro transaction frequency (visits per active Pro per month) as the leading indicator.

**4. Pro vs. DIY Customer Mix %.** Home Depot does not publish the exact split but disclosed in FY26 commentary that Pro comps outperformed DIY. Lowe's reports Pro is roughly 30-40% of revenue. The strategic question is the trajectory — Pro should be growing 2-4x faster than DIY for the next three years, otherwise the long-term growth story breaks.

**5. E-Commerce Penetration %.** Lowe's posted 15.5% online sales growth in Q1 FY26; Home Depot crossed 10%+ online comp for the fourth straight quarter. Online is roughly 15-18% of total sales at both chains, with BOPIS (buy-online-pickup-in-store) and ship-from-store fulfillment carrying most of the volume. Pure ship-to-home is ~3-5% of sales.

**6. Installation/Services Revenue ($B).** Lowe's June 2025 acquisition of Artisan Design Group added 132 facilities, 3,200 installers, and a builder/multifamily channel. Home Depot's HD Supply and SRS Distribution units do the same for Pro. Services revenue (installed roofing, flooring, kitchen, HVAC) carries higher gross margin than product alone and locks the customer in for the next project.

**7. Gross Margin %.** Home Depot reported FY2025 gross margin of approximately 33.3%, down 10 basis points year-over-year. Lowe's runs slightly above 33%. The 10-30 bp annual movement is the executive scorecard — sustained 50+ bp compression signals either lumber pressure, Pro mix dilution, or shrink rising.

**8. Inventory Turnover (turns/year).** Home Depot ended FY2025 at 4.4 turns. Lowe's runs slightly lower at 3.6-3.8. The turn metric matters most during deflation — when lumber prices fall, slow-turning inventory has to be marked down. Operators flexed working-capital management hard in 2023-2024 to absorb the lumber unwind.

**9. Storm-Recovery Sales Bump (basis points).** Hurricane Helene contributed an estimated 50-100 basis points to Home Depot comps in Q3 FY24; FY2025 hurricane season was milder. The leaders model hurricane probability into the regional plan and pre-position generators, tarps, plywood, and pumps 7-10 days ahead of landfall. Storm bumps reverse out 2-3 quarters later as the recovery-spend cycle completes.

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    A[Housing Macro Inputs] --> B{Mortgage Rate + Existing-Home Turnover}
    B -->|Soft| C[DIY Repair-Maintenance Mix Grows]
    B -->|Strong| D[Big-Ticket Project Mix Grows]
    C --> E[Comparable Sales Growth]
    D --> E
    E --> F{Pro vs DIY Split}
    F -->|Pro 30-40%| G[High Ticket + High Frequency]
    F -->|DIY 60-70%| H[Lower Ticket + Lower Frequency]
    G --> I[Services Attach: Install + Delivery]
    H --> J[BOPIS + Ship-from-Store]
    I --> K[Gross Margin %]
    J --> K
    K --> L[Inventory Turns]
    L --> M[Reinvest in Pro Tools + Digital + Distribution]
    M --> A
    N[Storm Events] -.->|50-200 bps| E
```

## Real Operators

**Home Depot** is the category leader at $164.7B in FY2025 net sales, ~2,350 U.S. Stores, and a Pro engine reinforced by SRS Distribution (roofing, building materials, and exterior products) acquired in 2024. **Lowe's** runs ~1,750 U.S. Stores at $86.3B FY2025 revenue and is executing its "Total Home" strategy with Artisan Design Group bringing 3,200 installers in-house. **Menards** is the third national big-box at ~350 stores across the Midwest, privately held, with strong lumber and building-materials share. **Ace Hardware** (cooperative) runs ~5,500 mostly franchised small-format stores that serve the convenience-and-fix-it niche the big boxes underweight. **True Value** is the smaller hardware cooperative competitor. **Tractor Supply** is the rural-and-ranch adjacent format at ~2,300 stores doing roughly $15B revenue, capturing the agricultural Pro the big boxes do not serve. **Floor & Decor** is the specialty flooring deep-dive disruptor at ~245 stores. **The Sherwin-Williams Paint Stores Group** competes for the Pro painter wallet. **84 Lumber** is the privately held pro-only lumber-and-building-materials competitor that serves residential contractors. **Builders FirstSource** is the largest pro-only LBM supplier at ~$17B revenue, an indirect competitor for the Home Depot/Lowe's Pro book.

## Failure Modes

The four that kill big-box home improvement P&Ls. **(1) Pro investment without operational redesign** — opening Pro desks but not changing the morning-replenishment cadence, job-site delivery SLAs, or trade credit terms; Pro frequency stalls and the CAC is wasted. **(2) Comp-sales optical management** — chasing ticket through promotional bundling instead of growing traffic, masking 2-3 quarters of underlying decline. **(3) Lumber-deflation working-capital trap** — failing to mark-to-market inventory as lumber prices unwind, then taking a one-time gross-margin charge that lands in the same quarter as a Pro mix-shift dilution. **(4) Storm-recovery double-counting** — booking the hurricane-comp bump as run-rate growth and missing the reversal in the comparable quarter twelve months later.

## Reporting Cadence

**Daily:** comp sales by region, transactions, ticket, BOPIS/online fulfillment SLA, big-ticket order count. **Weekly:** Pro versus DIY mix by region, lumber commodity index, e-commerce comp growth, inventory in-stock %, services backlog. **Monthly:** gross margin by department, inventory turns by category, Pro loyalty active rate, services revenue and attach rate, shrink metrics. **Quarterly:** full P&L, Pro mix trajectory, storm-recovery contribution decomposition, SRS/ADG integration progress, capital allocation review for the board and earnings call.

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    A[Daily Store + Online Telemetry] --> B[Comp + Ticket + Transactions + BOPIS SLA]
    B --> C[Weekly Pro-DIY Operating Review]
    C --> D[Pro Mix + Lumber Index + Services Backlog + In-Stock %]
    D --> E[Monthly Business Review]
    E --> F[Gross Margin + Turns + Loyalty Active + Services Attach]
    F --> G[Quarterly Earnings + Board]
    G --> H[Full P&L + Storm Bump + Integration + Capital]
    H --> I[Re-forecast Pro Pipeline + Commodity + Services Capacity]
    I --> A
```

## 30/60/90 Day Plan

**Days 1–30:** instrument the nine KPIs at store, region, and channel grain. Reconcile comp-sales reporting between merchandising and finance — they will not match on first pull because of returns timing, services billing, and Pro credit-terms revenue recognition. Baseline Pro versus DIY mix by region using the loyalty-card data and dial in the lumber-index sensitivity model for the trailing eight quarters.

**Days 31–60:** ship the Pro frequency dashboard. Tie loyalty-card data against job-site delivery, trade-credit utilization, and BOPIS Pro orders. Identify the bottom-quartile regions on Pro frequency and brief the regional operations leaders. Stand up the storm-recovery playbook with pre-position SKU lists for the Atlantic and Gulf coast regions in time for hurricane season.

**Days 61–90:** run the first quarterly services-attach reset. Model installation revenue against product sales for kitchen, flooring, and roofing; identify the bottom-quartile categories on attach and brief the merchandising team. Refresh the lumber commodity hedging and inventory-position model. Present the operating model with monthly checkpoints to the CFO and a five-year housing-cycle scenario.

## FAQ

**How do you separate lumber price impact from underlying comp?** Both Home Depot and Lowe's footnote disclose lumber's contribution to comp variance. Subtract the commodity-driven basis points from headline comp to get the operating comp; the gap between the two is the cleanest signal of whether merchants or macro is moving the number.

**What is the right Pro mix target?** 40% is the stretch target for the leaders by 2028 and the directional point of the SRS Distribution and Artisan Design Group acquisitions. Below 25% means the operator is still essentially a DIY retailer with a Pro counter, not a Pro-first commercial business.

**Is e-commerce really 15%+ of sales?** Yes, but the definition matters. Most of that volume is BOPIS or ship-from-store — the customer transacted online but the order fulfilled out of a physical store. Pure ship-to-home from a distribution center is roughly 3-5% of sales, and that is where the operating-margin pressure sits.

**How do you treat storm-recovery quarters?** Always disclose the storm-driven basis points in the earnings release and exclude them from forward-comp guidance. Failing to do that creates an artificial deceleration narrative the following year that takes 3-4 quarters to wash through.

## Sources

- The Home Depot, Inc. — Form 10-K (FY2025) and Q1 FY2026 Earnings Release
- Lowe's Companies, Inc. — Form 10-K (FY2025) and Q1 FY2026 8-K filings
- Lowe's Companies, Inc. — 2025 Annual Report (Artisan Design Group acquisition disclosure)
- Hardware Retailing Magazine — Big-Box and Independent Hardware Reporting
- North American Hardware and Paint Association (NHPA) — Industry Performance Reports
- IBISWorld — Home Improvement Stores in the U.S. Industry Report
- U.S. Census Bureau — Building Materials and Garden Equipment Dealers Annual Retail Trade Survey
- Joint Center for Housing Studies (Harvard) — Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA)
- Random Lengths and Fastmarkets — Lumber and Building-Materials Price Indices
- SRS Distribution and Builders FirstSource — Pro-Channel Competitive Filings

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