One interesting aspect of e-commerce sales comes when looking further into the breakdown of sales by retail category. (A major shortfall of the way the Census Bureau reports e-commerce data is that it is categorized by the business that sells the product rather than the product itself. For example, this method of categorization does not provide the percentage of books sold via e-commerce.) In 2012,the latest year in which category breakdowns are currently available, 85 percent of all e-commerce sales come from establishments categorized as "Electronic shopping and mail order houses" which basically means retailers with no physical storefront such as Amazon. That leaves only $35 billion, or less than 1 percent of sales, from stores with a physical presence that took place online. Motor vehicles and parts dealers derived the greatest percentage of sales among physical retailers, followed by the sporting goods, hobby, book, and music store megacategory. Those were the only two categories of physical retailers that attribute more than 2 percent of the sales to e-commerce.

Another interesting statistic is that just over 40 percent of sales at business that categorize themselves as "electronic shopping and mail order houses" are not e-commerce related. This means that people are still calling or sending physical order slips in to place orders.This in down from 50 percent in 2008 but it still represents over $130 billion in sales.

So, as much as it seems that e-commerce has taken over the retail landscape it still only accounts for $1 of every $16 spent in retail outlets.For more information you can look at the Census Bureau's page on e-commerce statistics here.

In the next posts I will dig deeper into specific product categories of e-commerce to see how they have changed within the retail landscape.

The ABA Indie Impact Study Series included 133 business surveys in ten separate communities that were used to identify exactly where the money spent at independent business wind up after the initial consumer transaction. The five main economic advantages independent businesses have over chains are:

1. Greater employment per dollar of revenue.
2. Local ownership keeps profits in community.
3. Use of local business support services.
4. Greater likelihood to use locally made products.
5. Greater share of revenue used for charitable giving.

As the charts below show, the advantage that independent retailers have over national chains is a 48% vs. 14% recirculation rate. Independent restaurants hold a 65% to 30% edge. This additional money in the local economy leads to more employment, wages, and additional sales occurring in the community.

We are in the process of conducting another round of these studies to be released at the end of 2014. This study allows communities to show their community, business members, local officials, and media that independent businesses are having an important impact in their respective city without relying on results from national studies. The results are specific to your community and can be an important tool in showing the economic advantages of shopping at independent businesses. Information about the process can be found here.

They developed a methodology that involved breaking a city down into a series of 200-meter-by-200 meter squares and analyzing each based on a series of indicators of economic vitality. Data sources included city, county, state, federal, and publicly available private data that were all tied together to create a composite "character score" to allow the measurement to occur.

Among the various conclusions are that the oldest, most diverse & finest-grained buildings produced "more jobs per commercial square foot" and "significantly more non-chain businesses" than the newest, largest, and least age-diverse buildings. This is a topic that we have been addressing since our Andersonville study showed local businesses have more sales per square foot than national chains. We expanded upon it for our Thinking Outside the Box study in New Orleans as well by demonstrating how much larger the economic impact of many, smaller independent businesses can be when compared to large-scale national retailers.

It is great to see those smaller projects validated by this large, complex endeavor taken on by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Although the data is specific to the three cities listed above, there are many concepts that can be applied to cities around the country.