In February in the USA, for the first time ever, online sales overtook a brick-and-mortar general retail shops sales. See for example this CNBC snippet ‘Online shopping overtakes a major part of retail for the first time ever‘. And when one looks at the curve it is deemed to continue!
This transformation of retailing was in the works for the last 15 years and it has taken all this time to reach that amazing stage. Still it is also interesting to watch that stores sales have remained quite stable over time (in percentage of overall retail, but increasing in absolute value) and that online sales only represent 11% of total retail sales.
In reality when one looks in detail at US retail sales from the US Census (latest), food & beverage stores, and most importantly, motor dealers, still sell more in value than online non-store sales.
Still, this statistics explain why large department stores are struggling in the US. And the amazing number of almost 60 billion $ per month of online sales is quite incredible when translated in a sheer number of packages sent for delivery!
