E-Commerce To Cross $200 Billion Threshold This Year

It’s all but certain that when the smoke clears after Q4 holiday shopping in the US, ecommerce will have crossed the $200 billion threshold for the first time. That’s based on extrapolating from data released today by comScore. The firm reported that ecommerce in the third quarter was $47.5 billion. That’s up 13 percent vs. Q3 […]

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It’s all but certain that when the smoke clears after Q4 holiday shopping in the US, ecommerce will have crossed the $200 billion threshold for the first time. That’s based on extrapolating from data released today by comScore.

The firm reported that ecommerce in the third quarter was $47.5 billion. That’s up 13 percent vs. Q3 2012. We can probably expect fourth quarter ecommerce spending to be more than $60 billion, which would easily lift the full-year 2013 total to more than $200 billion.

These are impressive figures and the market shows robust growth. However a much bigger and but neglected story is internet-influenced offline spending. Depending on how you define it (to include just products or products and services) online-to-offline shopping is worth well over $1 trillion.

Overall ecommerce is a little less than 6 percent of total US retail spending according to the US Commerce Department. That figure may inch up a bit after Q4, however.

Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail Sales: Total and Ecommerce

ecommerce US govt figures

Source: US Census Bureau/Commerce Dept (Q2 2013)


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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