It seems as though most economic data that’s been released this year, be it from a government agency like the Commerce Department or via industry and trade groups reporting on specific sectors of our economy, has done little but induce depression. Unemployment is up, the deficit is widening and as we’ve been reporting fairly frequently, sales at brick and mortar retail stores continue to underperform.
Thankfully, we’re at least seeing one economic indicator that continues to point upward and provide some hope—online retail spending.
According to the Internet tracking firm comScore, e-commerce sales hit $32.9 billion in the second quarter this year, excluding online travel, auctions, automobiles and large corporate purchases.
Even though that was a little over 3 percent less than the total sales we saw in Q1, it still represents a 9 percent increase over sales during the second quarter last year. Additionally, that makes three straight quarters of year-over-year gains in online sales.
Overall, online retail sales have totaled $66.9 billion through the first half of 2010, which is also a 9 percent increase over the $61 billion that was reported during the first six months of 2009.
“The second quarter’s continuation of the first quarter’s strong retail e-commerce growth rates is encouraging,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “We remain cautiously optimistic heading into the second half of the year, but will be keeping a close eye on unemployment rates, which, along with potential uncertainty in the stock market, could limit growth in e-commerce spending in the near term.”
comScore also reported that consumer electronics, software, computers and PDAs and books/magazines were the top performing product categories during the second quarter as well.
While impressive, the increase over the first half of 2010 is not the largest percentage reported for a six month period in recent years. First half online sales in 2008 were up almost 12 percent from the year before.
Driving the strong growth of e-commerce sales thus far in 2010 has largely been upper income households, those with annual incomes of over $100,000. That demographic is spending about 17 percent more online than they did last year.
Like comScore, we’re also cautiously optimistic about online retail sales for the rest of the year but it must be said that a strong first six months of 2010 certainly bodes well for the second half, which is full of shopping holidays. As always, leave us your thoughts and comments!
[...] EcommerceJunkie mentioned that in overall, online retail sales have totaled $66.9 billion through the first half of 2010, which is also a 9 percent increase over the $61 billion that was reported during the first six months of 2009. [...]
[...] Despite the recession, online retail sales have totaled $66.9 billion through the first half of 2010, which is also a 9 percent increase over the $61 billion that was reported during the first six months of 2009, according to ecommercejunkie.com. [...]