The State of Ecommerce in the US: Stats and Trends

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key ecommerce stats and trends from the US.

Total Ecommerce Sales

This is probably the understatement of the year… ecommerce is enormous in the United States.
Consumers spent $517.36 billion online with US retailers in 2018, up 15% from $449.88 billion the previous year.
These are big numbers, but the value of items added to baskets and not purchased is around $2.260bn (based on SaleCycle abandonment rates).
It’s also estimated that online sales of physical goods are going to surpass $735 billion by 2023.

Ecommerce represented 14.3% of total US online retail sales in 2018. For comparison,  ecommerce represented 18% of all retail sales in the UK and 18.4% in China.
Amazon accounted for 40% of US online retail in 2018. Which leads us onto the most popular online stores in the US for 2018.

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Most Popular Online Stores in the US

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is at the top of this list. SimilarWeb recorded that the Amazon website gets an average of approximately 1.87 billion visits per month, which results in annual net ecommerce sales of $64.3 billion.

This is then followed by the supermarket giant, Walmart.com, with a revenue of $16.5 billion from approximately 120.4 million visits per month (eBay.com beat Walmart by websites visits, with an average of 817.6 million visits per month).

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Black Friday & Cyber Monday in the US

Although online sales in the US are growing year on year, a source of this growth comes from the biggest shopping period of the year – Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
Last year Black Friday online sales reached $6.2 billion, which was up 23.6% on 2017’s numbers.

And Cyber Monday 2018 was a record breaker, with online sales reaching $7.9 billion, which was 19% higher than in 2017.

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Mobile Commerce

Where there is a shopper…  there is a smartphone.
Due to the increase of smartphones and tablets, online retail has expanded and adapted to mobile shoppers.
In December 2017, 82% of online users in the US used a mobile device for online shopping, with 35% being mobile-only online shoppers.
It’s predicted that by 2021, mobile will dominate online sales, bringing in $659 billion or 54% in sales.
Brands have adapted with  changes such as mobile-optimized websites, shopping apps and digital wallets, which are designed to encourage buying and make mobile shopping easier.
It’s predicted that in 2019, US mobile retail revenues are expected to amount to $267.47 billion which is up from $156.28 billion in 2017. So if your site is not mobile friendly – you’ll miss out!
Fashion is one of the largest ecommerce sectors and research from Nosto shows that North America has the lowest desktop and mobile conversion rates compared to Europe and other countries for fashion.

This could be for a variety of reasons, shipping costs, ecommerce websites won’t load properly or even shoppers are just browsing!
But on the other hand, when we look at AOV, the stats are different. North American fashion sites are generating the highest AOV, at $103 for desktop and $96 for mobile, while UK AOVs are much lower, at $82 on desktop and $75 for mobile.

Ecommerce sites can increase their online sales by introducing such features as cart abandonment emails, promo codes, live trends data, bringing back those shoppers who’ve abandoned.
Research shows that the most commonly abandoned online items in the US are clothes, whereas fitness equipment purchases had an abandonment rate of 2%.

There are many reasons why people abandon purchases online, according to a survey 63% of respondents stated they had abandoned shopping carts due to the cost of shipping.
There are many ways to help reduce cart abandonment, from guest check out to address shortcuts, here’s some handy tips if you want to learn more.

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Want to find out more about cart abandonment?

If you’re based in the USA and want to know how SaleCycle can help you increase your online sales, get in touch.

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