Boom time: E-commerce sales in US grow by almost 31% in Q2 — and counting

Under stay-at-home orders, US consumers are shopping big time. Retail e-commerce sales jumped by almost a third — 31.8 percent — from the previous quarter, according to the the US Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce (DOC).

That’s $211.51 billion in the second quarter, up from $160.41 billion in the first.

On the flip side: the gains couldn’t offset the losses from brick-and-mortar stores. Total retail sales dropped 3.9 percent from the prior quarter.

Meanwhile, e-commerce picked up nearly five percentage points in the total retail market over just one quarter, according to the DOC. That accounts for 16.1 percent of all retail sales in the second quarter.

Emarketer estimates that e-commerce will make up 14.5 percent of US retail sales this year, up from 11.0% in 2019 — “the largest year-over-year increase since we began measuring the channel in 2008.

“We also expect e-commerce to retain this increased share of the retail market after lockdowns are lifted,” analyst Nina Goetzen wrote.

“The pandemic has only accelerated an ongoing shift to the channel. Even as stores reopen and brick-and-mortar sales rebound, we forecast that e-commerce will lose just a 0.1 percent share of total retail sales in 2021, before gaining more than 1 percentage point each year through 2024. By then, US e-commerce sales will surpass $1 trillion and represent 18.1 percent of total retail sales in the US.”