E-Commerce Meets Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown

But some big sectors are still resisting.
There is one sector in retail that is seriously booming: E-commerce sales in the third quarter jumped 15.5% from a year ago, to $115 billion seasonally adjusted, a new record, according to the Commerce Department this morning. This includes online sales by brick-and-mortar retailers. Over the same period, total retail sales increased 4.3%. And retail sales without e-commerce – an approximation for brick-and-mortar sales – ticked up only 3.1%, barely staying ahead of 2% inflation and 0.8% population growth.
The chart below shows the e-commerce sales boom on a quarterly basis (seasonally adjusted). Note the beating during the Great Recession. Not even e-commerce is recession proof. It was sharp. People just stopped clicking on the ‘buy’ button. But it was short. By Q3 2009, e-commerce was setting records again:

But how much of a danger is e-commerce to brick-and-mortar retail? Many observers keep pointing out that e-commerce accounts for only a tiny part of total retail sales. And that’s true. While growing rapidly, the numbers are still relatively small. In the third quarter, the e-commerce share of total retail was still just 9.1%, but that’s up from 8.2% a year ago.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ Nov 17, 2017.