Article by Nina Goetzen
Source: www.emarketer.com, September 2020
Under stay-at-home orders, US consumers shopped heavily online, as expected: In Q2 2020, US retail ecommerce sales grew by almost a third (31.8%) from the previous quarter, or 44.5% year over year, per the US Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce (DOC).
That’s $211.51 billion in Q2 2020, up from $160.41 billion in Q1 2020. This strong ecommerce growth wasn’t enough to offset losses from brick-and-mortar store closures, however, as total retail sales dropped 3.9% from the prior quarter.
Still, ecommerce picked up nearly 5 percentage points in the total retail market over just one quarter, according to the DOC, accounting for 16.1% of all retail sales in Q2. We estimate that ecommerce will make up 14.5% 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.