Growth of Internet Shopping or e-Commerce

Outside of grocery stores, retail stores have been hard hit by the pandemic as most have seen drastically reduced traffic to their stores and a decline in overall sales. For many of these stores, the saving grace has been their E-commerce operations.

As you can see from the chart below, e-Commerce has been steadily growing as a percentage of overall spending from 5% in 2009 to 16% in 2019. However, the pandemic has sped up this trend to 34% of total spending, in what many are calling 10 years of growth in only 3 months.

As most of you could guess, Amazon has received a lion’s share of this sales growth, but the spending has been more widespread than you would think as almost all retailers have shifted their attention to online sales. A secondary effect is that this has caused a huge boost to industrial real estate is such as the distribution warehouses used by Amazon  and owned by the Blackstone Real Estate Income Fund.