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How big is e-commerce? It depends.

I'm just fiddling around here, but thought this was interesting:

When you hear about e-commerce, it's commonly described as about 15% of all sales. Which is fair enough. But that includes things like gasoline and eating out, which can't be purchased online, plus autos, which are still mostly an in-person business. If you look at e-commerce just as a percentage of retail sales excluding those three categories, it's currently about 28% of all purchases.

In other words, for ordinary retail goods it's a lot bigger than most of us think. And it's still growing, unlike e-commerce as a percentage of all sales.

5 thoughts on “How big is e-commerce? It depends.

  1. rick_jones

    There is, or at least was a “gasoline as a service” offering where a fuel truck would come to your car and fill’er up.

  2. different_name

    I'm not sure "online sales" as a category makes a lot of sense anymore.

    Of course sellers care about the difference for a variety of reasons, they have to.

    But for consumers, well, tell me which category this is. The owners of my local hardware know me, I've been going there for over 20 years, and they're old-school about customer service. Last time I was physically in there, I was looking for sawblades they didn't have. The owner told me to go the website and place an order so he wouldn't forget to get more. Then a week or so later, his kid dropped them by my house. So was that an online order?

    My employer watches a metric related to how many transactions we have that do not require any followup customer service, how many involved human phone calls, and various other ways of chopping up our trade. It certainly makes sense for us, but there's no good reason to report "retail that did not involve phone calls" on a national basis.

    I'm not sure it makes sense to distinguish "online" anymore, either.

    Amazon is just the second coming of the Sears catalog.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      I like your last sentence; it's a good analogy.

      But even back then, it was all "retail," but catalog sales were very different from in-store sales. In-store involved distributed inventory, parceled out to all the store sights, while catalog inventory was vastly more efficient to manage. In-store was much more labor-intensive for the merchant, compared to catalog sales which involved clerical functions and warehouse functions.

      The comparison is similar to the two types of supply functions done in the military. Supply depots are vastly more efficient than local supply rooms.

      1. different_name

        In-store was much more labor-intensive for the merchant

        Absolutely. But modern supply chains are proving to be a bit different. Again, look at Amazon.

        I ordered groceries for delivery some during the Covid outbreak. Watching the delivery on the map, orders always started at a specific location, clearly a warehouse. But most of the time it would stop by the Whole Foods nearest me on the way, presumably for whatever wasn't in the warehouse. You can also add "select" things from amazon.com to food delivery, another sign of integrated logistics. I haven't ordered stuff from Target or Walmart, but my understanding is they do similar things.

        And that's part of my point - I don't think the categories map the same way anymore. Automation-dispatched logistics with integrated warehouse/retail is a different animal, even before you get to weird, hybrid human-driven things like I was talking about before that.

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