Between June 2021 and June 2022, the number of eCommerce-enabled companies increased by 66% globally.
If you don't dig into the details, the surface-level explanation would be that every business that is starting now, is starting out as an eCommerce business. So the long tail should be swelling.
That is simply not true though.
There is an increase in the number of companies that have added eCommerce capabilities in the last year and it is substantial, standing at 60%. But, the companies with less than 500K traffic rank, at which point they start becoming economically viable businesses, have doubled in the last year. In fact, companies with $10M+ GMV have tripled.
Mind you, this is not the "revenue growth" that we are talking about. So it's not about inflation and its impact on GMV. We are talking about the number of active eCommerce websites increasing by 66% and it is likely a lot of smaller ones from previous years have gained enough momentum that mid-market and top-tier eCommerce segments are seeing significant growth. This is good news. If you are targeting mid-market and large eCommerce companies, your market has doubled or tripled in the last year.
The story of US eCommerce is no different.
There were 5.4M new business registration applications in 2021. That is 21% more than the applications that happened in 2020. That said, not every application goes through toward becoming a real business. Census data projects that, we will roughly see 350,000 new businesses in 2022.
Keeping the census projection in context, we can say that the rate at which existing websites/businesses in the US become eCommerce-enabled is five times that of the new business registrations.
Shopify gained the most. We looked at the 1M-3M traffic rank segment. Shopify gained a 158% increase in merchants in this segment. The lifting tide lifted Wix and WooCommerce as well, registering a 55% and a 41% increase respectively.
There is a part 2 to this story. eCommerce as a percentage of retail GMV is slowing down or reverting to pre-pandemic levels. All the newly active eCommerce websites' economic activity is captured in this representation. But the good news is deferred. The 'top of the funnel' that produces mid-market and large eCommerce companies with a 2-3 year lag is alive and kicking. For every new business that starts, two or three existing businesses are turning on eCommerce. This should mean a lift in eCommerce's contribution to retail sales unaided by a black swan event like COVID.
Long eCommerce!
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