(Drivebycuriosity) - There is a lot talk about the rise of online sales. Unfortunately there are no official data for the US. The Americans publish data about baseball, football and other sports but not about Internet usage. Fortunately the British government delivers monthly numbers for "Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales". Anyway I assume that the trends in the US are not very different from the UK.
The image above shows that the UK had a trend of climbing Internet sales as percentage of total retail ( ons.gov.uk). From 2006 through 2019, before the Covid 19 pandemic started, this number rose from 2.5% to 21%, on average about 1.4 percent points per year. Then came the Covid 19 pandemic and forced many to shop at home, boosting the online sales. In January 2021 the share of the British online sales peaked at 37.8%.
But since Covid 19 disappeared from of the headlines the online sales dropped, at least in percent of total retail sales. The image above amplifies the recent 4 years - influenced by the pandemic. In the recent 12 months the number stagnated at 25.3% (September 2022 25.2&).
The slowdown surprised me. I had expected that the pandemic will change the behavior of the shoppers and online sales will continue their relative growth on a higher level. The numbers disagree.
Apparently people stick with their habits. People forgot about Covid and the advantages of online sales and went back to physical shops, at least party. Barnes & Nobles is opening new book shops in the US and others too (timeout ). It seems that the majority still ignores the time and costs of shopping and the risks of Covid infections.
This relativizes also the alleged market power of online sellers which is part of the huge lawsuit by America`s antitrust agency FTC against Amazon ( driveby).
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