Clothing & general merchandise online retailers are the biggie.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Ecommerce sales rose by 1.4% in Q2 from Q1, seasonally adjusted, to $304 billion, according to the Census Bureau today. Year-over-year, ecommerce sales were up by 5.3% (red in the chart).
Not seasonally adjusted, ecommerce sales rose to $293 billion (blue).
Over the past four quarters, ecommerce sales reached $1.2 trillion, not seasonally adjusted, up by 6.9% from the prior four-quarter period.
The Census Bureau’s quarterly retail sales and ecommerce data for Q2, released today, is based not only on surveys sent to retailers, but also on administrative records from other government agencies in anonymized form, such as the IRS.
So this quarterly data set is more complete and accurate than the monthly “advance retail sales” (July retail sales were released last Friday), which is based on the first batch of surveys and no administrative data.
The purpose of the monthly “advance retail sales” is to get it out quickly for a first look as to how that month went. But then it gets revised heavily as more surveys come in (Friday’s report substantially revised upward the growth rates of the prior two months), which is why it’s called “advance retail sales.”
Even the quarterly retail sales and ecommerce data — based on surveys and on administrative data — is still labeled “preliminary” for one quarter, and is also revised as more data comes in, but the revisions aren’t that huge. The quarterly data also lags a little and therefore doesn’t get the blazing-headline treatment of the monthly “advance retail sales.”
Ecommerce sales are sales by retailers where the product was ordered online. It doesn’t matter how the merchandise gets into the home, whether delivered to the home, or picked up at a locker or at a store. Ecommerce sales are sales by retailers, such as Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy, including small operations with employees, but don’t include operations that sell plane tickets, concert tickets, hotel bookings, Uber or Waymo rides, insurance, etc.
By comparison, overall retail sales, including ecommerce, rose by 0.4% in Q2 from Q1 seasonally adjusted and by 3.9% year-over-year, to $1.87 trillion, according to the Census Bureau data today.
Since Q2 2019:
- Total retail sales: +41%
- Ecommerce sales: +125%
The share of ecommerce sales rose to 16.3% of total retail sales, seasonally adjusted, matching the record set in Q2 2020 (16.3%), when many brick-and-mortar stores were closed and lots of shopping shifted to ecommerce.
Ecommerce by major category.
The quarterly ecommerce data also includes sales by major category. This was an “experimental” data set that the Census Bureau launched in 2019, along with lots of caveats, with by-category data going back to 2018. But this data has gaps when it doesn’t “meet publication quality,” as Census explains, it is not seasonally adjusted, and it has a lot of variability in addition to the strong seasonality effects. So with these caveats, here we go.
Census provides data on four major groups of retailers covering about 41% of total ecommerce sales. The rest of ecommerce sales are spread over other retailers. So this is not a complete list of what is all included in ecommerce sales.
- Clothing & general merchandise retailers: +160% since Q2 2019, +11.2% year-over-year, $54 billion in Q2. Sales in this category spike massively during the holiday shopping season in Q4 (red).
- Furniture, building materials, and electronics retailers: +124% since Q2 2019, +8.1% year-over-year, $30 billion in Q2 (blue).
- Food, health & personal care, sporting goods, etc. retailers: +139% since Q2 2019, +8.8% year-over-year, $20 billion in Q2 (yellow).
- Motor vehicle & parts retailers: +74% since Q2 2019, +16% year-over-year, $17 billion in Q2.
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Yep….I just ordered some underware today at Temu. I hope they fit. I got a good deal. Real cotton…or so they say.