Skip to content

19 thoughts on “Raw data: E-commerce as a share of all retail sales”

  1. frankwilhoit

    2020 reflects necessity, the subsequent decline reflects distaste. My individual view is that much of the distaste is down to one particular shipper. YM, as they say, MV.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      I guess Bezos needs to think twice before engaging in Big Tech Censorship.

      The oppressed are voting with their wallets.

      1. frankwilhoit

        Sorry to mislead you, Monty. I used the wrong word: for "shipper" read "carrier". I was going to say it is the one with the white trucks, but a big part of the problem is that they use contractors who drive random unmarked trucks (which I think is illegal?) or, in one case, an actual U-Haul; and the subcontracted drivers appear to work without any scrutiny, accountability, or standards.

  2. golack

    Are we seeing peak e-commerce at ca. 15%???

    I'd like to see it broken down by category, and demographics.
    Food delivery services have burned through their capital, so charges are showing up. Same with ride share prices going up--investors want their profit now. It will be interesting to see how the market responds.

  3. ScentOfViolets

    There's an awful lot of stuff you can buy online fer sure. I stronly suspect however, that most people won't buy a pig in a poke. Who orders a gas grill online sight unseen?

    1. iamr4man

      Apparently, some people are buying beds(!) online. I really don’t get that. How do you buy a bed without trying it out?

      1. Art Eclectic

        I've bought two recently without a try out. The trick is to buy from someone with a robust return policy. Costco stands out here, our first bed from them was too firm and we returned for another, more agreeable, model without any hitch.

        All of the big online sellers off similar return policies. Using reviews from places like Consumer Reports is quite helpful.

        1. iamr4man

          We have a king size bed. Returning something like that would be a king size hassle!
          I always research larger purchases. But even then there are many items that reviews can’t really help except to steer you in a particular direction. Everyone has their own preference when it comes to things like beds, headphones, and (particularly) pizza.

          1. Art Eclectic

            Nah, easy return with Costco. They can't resell the bed so they just send out the junk truck and they load it up. All you have to do is get it to the front door.

    2. Art Eclectic

      From what I understand, a lot of those sales are people who know exactly what they want but the brick and mortar vendor is out of stock. I end up doing that quite often. Brick and mortar has stocking issues and inventory breadth issues. They only carry the most popular items and once the store is out, you're SOL unless another store has stock.

      I have a bunch of things on subscription, partly because physical retailers run out of stock.

      I'd garner a guess that the drop in eCommerce as Covid eased was largely people who went back to grocery shopping at the store.

  4. Art Eclectic

    I'd also bet that if Kevin extrapolated out the trend line in his chart 10 years we'd see that Ecommerce adoption accelerated by about 10 years due to Covid.

  5. cld

    Amazon Prime seems to have cut back dramatically on using UPS or FedEx, every delivery now seems to be from a different carrier.

    Only once have I seen the van clearly labelled 'Prime' and that appeared to be a second hand, or perhaps stolen, UPS truck with the logo painted over.

    1. Art Eclectic

      I used to see some of the converted delivery trucks (white vans to painted over Budget trucks), I assume those were a beta test of Amazon deciding if it made sense to cut out the middleman and do their own last mile. We just had a local hub open up about a mile from where I live and now we see branded Sprinters all the time. You can't even get gas in the morning near the hub without being in line behind 15 Amazon trucks. I'd bet on Bezos investing in his own fuel depots in the future.

      I think the delivery services (UPS ect) still come into play when the shipper is not an Amazon owned warehouse. With the amount of branded white label product Amazon is taking over and their own fulfillment centers, I'd guess that they are going to ratchet back the "marketplace" somewhat so they can keep control over product quality.

    2. HokieAnnie

      In my neck of the woods Amazon switched to the ubiquitous electric vans about a decade ago but UPS and FedEx are still all over the neighborhood delivering other stuff to folks.

Comments are closed.