Post updated on Thursday, October 3, at 6:20 pm to reflect replacing Amazon’s and eBay’s US revenue with their electronics & other general merchandise and enabled commerce value, respectively.
eMarketer released its latest forecast for US retail ecommerce holiday and mcommerce sales. For the full year it estimates that US ecommerce will generate $262.3 billion in sales, an increase of 16.4% year over year and slightly higher than the 16.2% increase last year. By 2017 eMarketer estimates that there will be $440 billion in sales for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8%.
Amazon and eBay growing in-line or faster than the total ecommerce market
Amazon’s electronics and other general merchandise sales grew at a 27.8% rate in the first half of 2013 after growing 34.5% in 2012. Additionally ChannelAdvisor has created a proprietary Same Store Sales (SSS) metric, which for Amazon averaged 24.5% in July and August. While ChannelAdvisors’ SSS tracked above Amazon’s electronics and other general merchandise sales growth rate of 28.1% and 27.6% in the March and June quarters by 4.2% and 1.4%, respectively, it does indicate that Amazon is still having significant growth.
eBay’s Enabled Commerce Volume (ECV) grew at almost a 20% rate in the first half of this year with its mobile commerce growing over 90% in the second quarter. ChannelAdvisor’s SSS for eBay averaged 19.7% for the months of July and August vs. 15.4% and 18.1% in the March and June quarters, respectively.
ChannelAdvisor works with thousands of online retailers and hundreds of e-commerce channels to sell billions of dollars of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). While its Same Store Sales metric is not a total representation of either Amazon’s or eBay’s partner and customer base due to its breadth of channels I believe it gives one indication of how their business is performing. I have developed a Google Doc with historical information on Amazon’s and eBay’s Same Store Sales via this link. I have also included a link to the methodology and limitations of the analysis.
Holiday ecommerce sales are expected to increase 15%
eMarketer estimates that US ecommerce will generate $61.8 billion in sales during November and December or 23.5% of total US ecommerce sales. This would be an increase of 15.1% from 2012, essentially the same growth rate as last year.
If holiday sales do come in with a growth rate of 15.1% vs. full year ecommerce growth at 16.2% it will continue a slight downward trend of ecommerce holiday sales accounting for a smaller portion of total ecommerce sales.
Source: eMarketer, September 2013
Mcommerce sales are expected to increase 68%
eMarketer estimates that mobile commerce or mcommerce will generate $41.68 billion of the total $262.3 billion of ecommerce sales for the year (third bar from the left). This would be an increase of 68.2% from 2012 and account for 16% of total ecommerce sales.
By 2017 mcommerce sales are expected to easily exceed $100 billion and reach over $113 billion which would be a CAGR of 28%,
Source: eMarketer, September 2013
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