The Almighty Consumer still loves e-ecommerce

Priming for Prime Day

• without e-commerce, we’d be nothing

• Black Friday comes early. Twice.

• Mobile shopping is taking over the world, and people like to be influenced

• BNPL-ing to the moon (or maybe not)

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The Almighty Consumer still loves e-ecommerce

Random Walk has been bullish on e-commerce for a while.

e-commerce has been the retail category that’s persevered through thick n’ thin. It’s dovetailed with a few other favored themes, like

• Cautious Consumerism (i.e. bargain hunting, discount shopping, and trading down);

• Hey Small Spender (i.e. the wage tailwind to lower-income service workers; and later, the Donna Summers Phase and White Collar Stagnation); and

• BNPL Contains Multitudes (i.e. extending credit to infra)

. . . all of which roughly comprise Buying Cheap Tchotchkes on the Internet.

You see, there is a method to my madness, and if you pay close enough attention, you can be different, right and early too (most of the time, at least).

Anyways, with Prime Day upon us, I figured it was as good a time as any to remind everyone that it’s still true: The Almighty Consumer loves e-ecommerce.

A lot.

Without e-commerce, we’d be nothing!

So much so, that by some measure, there would be no spending growth at all, without e-commerce:

JPM Spend Tracker

“Card Present” spending is negative yoy, while “Card Not Present” drives the entirety of the gains.

I don’t think people fully appreciate the fact that, without e-commerce, retail spending would be down yoy. Although, to be fair, this is just JPM’s panel, and the other caveat is that Apple Pay etc. may also be considered Card-Not-Present (and I can’t get a straight answer), so perhaps the shift isn’t quite so dramatic, but it’s still pretty dramatic.

Point is that people buy stuff online.

Black Friday comes early. Twice.

And they’re not getting tired of it. They’re breaking records.

To wit, some early data on the great summer online shop: