SURVEY SAYS YES U.S. E COMMERCE ACCOUNTS FOR AN ESTIMATED 13.3% OF US RETAIL SALES IN THE SECOND QUARTER

U.S. online retailers’ sales growth decelerated slightly in the second quarter compared with Q1 and 2017 as a whole.

U.S. online retailers generated $120.45 billion on the web in the first quarter, a 15.4% increase compared with $104.41 billion in Q2 2017, the Department of Commerce reported today.

This is a slightly lower growth rate than e-commerce for 2017 as a whole, when U.S. online sales rose 16.0% to reach $453.46 billion, compared with $390.99 billion in 2016. It’s also a slightly lower growth rate than the first quarter, when online sales from U.S. merchants grew 16.4%.

All figures are reported on a non-adjusted basis.

Total retail and food services sales grew 5.3% in Q2, according to the Commerce Department.

These retail sales figures from the Commerce Department include the sale of items not normally bought online, such as fuel and automobiles. When factoring these items out of the total retail sales figures, which Internet Retailer believes is the most accurate way to measure the impact of e-commerce on retail as a whole, total retail sales reached $904.90 billion. That would mean e-commerce represented 13.3% of total retail sales. That’s slightly less than Q1, when e-commerce represented 13.8% of total retail sales, according to Internet Retailer estimates.

For all of 2017, online sales accounted for 13.0% of total retail sales, according to Internet Retailer estimates.

Meanwhile, Salesforce recently released its Q2 Shopping Index, which found that online sales grew 16% globally in Q2. Traffic, Salesforce says, grew 7% and spend per shopper grew 8%. Salesforce’s findings are based on its analysis of shopping activity of more than 500 million consumers across the world. Salesforce also found that mobile orders grew 40% year over year globally in Q2, and that mobile devices accounted for 62% of all traffic to shopping sites.