Digital Commerce and Retail Statistics from July 2016
After three months of increases, retail sales were flat in July. What’s behind the slump? See the digital commerce and retail statistics from July 2016:
Nonstore Retail Sales Up, Brick-and-Mortar Down
• Year-over-year retail sales in the US saw little movement in July with no significant changes over June’s numbers.
• Nonstore retail, which includes eCommerce, mail-order, and door-to-door, saw a 14.2% increase in year-over-year sales.
• Department stores sales declined 0.5%, an interesting stat considering the recent announcement that Macy’s will close 100 retail stores.
While nonstore retail is up overall, eCommerce is largely responsible for that growth.
eCommerce Sees Record Growth
• eCommerce growth outpaced other nonretail categories in July, producing a possible 20% year-over-year growth in sales.
• In particular, Nordstrom.com saw 9.4% year-over-year growth while the department store’s brick-and-mortar stores experienced a decline.
• eCommerce sales in the garden equipment, electronics, and apparel categories decreased slightly over June.
• Sporting goods retailer Under Armour saw nearly 28% growth in sales, likely a benefit of Sports Authority’s shuttering. Dick’s Sporting Goods reported a 7.9% increase in total sales, including a 25.7% jump in web sales for Q2. Dick’s is likely headed toward further gains in eCommerce after it acquired Sports Authority’s web domain and customer data (including email addresses and rewards program data for over 28.5 million members).
Although US retail sales were flat in July, consumers continue to shift their spending away from brick-and-mortar to online stores. We’ve seen this trend firsthand in many of our clients’ performance, particularly the sporting goods category where growth exceeded 53% in July.
Stay tuned for next month’s digital commerce and retail stats to see if August performs any better.
Mitch Hirst is a digital analyst on the insights and optimizations team at LYONSCG. He is an expert at analyzing site experiences and transforming the resulting data into digestible, actionable customer insights.
