Most Retailers Have Yet to Make Big Internet Push

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This year, Global Powers of Retailing reports on the extent to which the top 100 global retailers have embraced the increasingly important e-commerce sales channel. The analysis is based only on those companies for which fiscal 2008 online sales information was available and those companies that did not operate a transactional website in 2008 and, therefore, had no online sales. Of the top 100 retailers, 69 are included in this analysis.

Overall, e-commerce accounted for an average of 6.6 percent of these retailers’ total sales in fiscal 2008. By product sector, online sales accounted for an average of 24 percent of hardlines/leisure retailers’ sales, though this includes Amazon, Dell, Office Depot and Staples, which drastically skews the results. Excluding these four e-commerce powerhouses, the figure drops to 5.1 percent for the nine remaining companies. For the fashion group (six retailers), online sales were 5.2 percent of the total. Retailers of fast-moving consumer goods represent the last bastion of merchants yet to embrace e-commerce. For the companies in this group, an average of only 0.9 percent of sales was generated through e-commerce.

Looking at the data by geographic region, Europe leads the pack with online sales averaging 4.1 percent. E-commerce accounted for 2.5 percent of sales for the North American retailers, excluding the four companies noted earlier. With those companies included in the results, the figure for the North American retailers jumps to 12 percent. The Asia/Pacific region lags, reporting average online sales of just 0.8 percent of total sales.

These results should be interpreted with extreme caution due to small sample sizes in some cases.