How to buy a mattress: Online versus in store and what to look for
Many consumers are now buying mattresses online, with 54% preferring digital purchases over in-store shopping. Online options often offer longer sleep trials, lower prices due to reduced overhead, and convenient delivery. Key considerations include checking return policies, warranty length, and taking advantage of major sales events like Memorial Day.
- ▪54% of people now buy mattresses online rather than in-store.
- ▪Online mattress retailers often provide sleep trials of at least 30 nights, with some offering up to 100 nights.
- ▪Mattresses-in-a-box made up 12% of the industry in 2019 and have grown significantly since.
- ▪Many online brands offer free or low-cost returns and long warranties.
- ▪Memorial Day and Black Friday are among the best times to find discounted mattresses online.
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| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/mattresses/how-to-buy-a-mattress-online-versus-in-store-and-what-to-look-for |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 09:45:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T09:47:12.963Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T09:47:12.963Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Z6tzEm88yzZZ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Mattresses How to buy a mattress: Online versus in store and what to look for Features By Lauren Jeffries published 17 May 2026 Buying a new bed? Why you should skip the showroom and shop online instead When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Future) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter So you’ve found a mattress you want to buy, but you’ve never tried it.
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